military intervention of some kind is a prerequisite to the resolution of the conflict we want to achieve. how much more have to die? how many more before we will act? but as it turns out acting actually may not be what we do or at least that is the feeling of the majority of americans who believe that the u.s. has no responsibility to intervene in syria. back with me are anthea butler and raul reyes, and dorian lord and rick newman. we were talking about how it was the post war era and after the great world war ii and the great sacrifices of that war that we became the best most exceptional selves, and yet here we are at this moment facing what feels like a similar human rights horrors and is that the way we re-establish the exceptionalism is to step in at a a moment like this? this has been a thorny
Years, and what has changed is the widest of all of the goals that divide us are the political ideology, and the pugh researchers found that the gap between the political parties has doubled. and the increase of the divide happened in the presidencies of george w. bush and barack obama. still here with me anthea butler, professor at the university of pennsylvania and raoul reyes, and dorian lord, assistant professor of columbia university and rick warren who is a reporter for the u.s. world news and report. so you have i don t want a communist in the school or what, but these data predicting what you are based on the partisanship troubles me. and what we know from the
attorney general eric holder notified congress last night that he has assigned two u.s. attorneys to lead criminal investigations into the possible leaks of the classified white house information, and president obama defended the administration against the claims that it helped to leak information no the drone attackers and suspected terrorists in syria. and a team has succeeded on capturing on video the proof of the doz own massacres of dozens of people there. and reuters reporting that dozen more people were killed overnight in shelling. we will have more on that in a little bit. it is time for the top political story. look, the past week for president obama was something out of a children s book a series of unfortunate events. he was smarting after the job numbers and then the campaign fund-raising juggernaut was upset by the news they had been outfunded by mitt romney, and then the scott walker recall in wisconsin, and that was a battle state where the rules of engagement had been changing, and bill clinton forgets the rules of being a surrogate, and do not directly disagree with the candidate, and saying that bush tax cuts should be extended when the president does not think so. so after a week of being on the defense, he decided to be on offense and he showed up in the briefing room to talk about the economy, and we all tuned in to see what he had to say about the american economy, except he talked a lot about some place else. right now, one concern is europe which faces a threat of renewed recession as countries deal with a financial crisis. if there s less demand for our products in places like paris or madrid, it could mean less businesses or less business for manufacturers in pittsburgh or milwaukee. hmm. when was the last time you heard an american president mention pittsburgh and milwaukee in the same sentence as, you know, paris and madrid? you know, it does not happen often, because in america we tend to think of ourselves as separate and apart from the rest of the world, and separated by more than just vast oceans, but also set apart with the special history, and the shining city on the hill, and americans like to think that we are exceptional, but here is president obama complicating the story a little bit. he is a patriot who reinforces the uniqueness, but yesterday the president admitted that we are interconnected. that when it comes to the economy, the fate of one is in fact tied to the fate of all. now, that is of course the kind of thinking that could get you voted out of the white house, because the rival mitt romney has cast an american exceptionalism that sees the country not only as apart, but above as a litmus test for leadership. we knew without question that there was extraordinary exceptional and special to be american. our president doesn t have the same feelings about american exceptionalism that we do. from the time the continental congress first called our states united, american exceptionalism has served as the binding identity and a standard for america, and even for those who criticized the country for the failure to live up to it, frederick douglass, susan anthony, martin luther king jr. all relied on america as a special place even as they press ed for change and think of it as a revolutionary narcissism, and now we are confronted with one of the kocornerstones of which have built the idea of america, and that the exceptionalism is derived from the economic power, and maybe that we are just as ordinary as the rest of the world, an indeed all of the bedrocks of the self-understanding are singular political ideology, and the military might have shifted and with them are the long held beliefs of what makes them exceptional may be fading which is okay, if it leads us to be more responsible and tolerant and global in the world, but the divergence of the american exceptionalism may sever the last threads of national identity that bind us together which is why this presidential e election may be presenting us with more than obvious decision and not just one between president obama and governor mitt romney, but a choice to reimagine and redefine what makes us exceptional now. joining me around the table anthea butler, and graduate of the eugenia university of pennsylvania, and also our latino contributor dorian lord, and also professor of scientific affairs and fellow at the roosevelt institute, and rick newman who is chief correspondent for the u.s. world news and report, and also author of rebound eers how you pivot from setback to success. thank you for being on the show. american exceptionalism as it is rooted in the economy, and are we in a place to make a claim for the exceptional economy? what is happening now is that we are basically redefining what it means to be american. we have gone from being on the toch heap to this whole sense of decline, and we don t know where we are headed. what is difference now is that this sense of american exceptionalism is something that america earned throughout the history in many ways throughout the 1800s and the industrial revolution and all of the great companies built that were the economic engine of the world and the 1800s and the world war ii and leadership and sacrifice associated with that and hard work and excellent leadership. we earned it, and now it seems that we have a sense of entitlement to it. so i think that we have sort of drifted from something that we earned to something that we expect. that is the problem. i i find that to be a really useful intervention, this idea that it is not bestowed upon us but that we earn it, and it does make me wonder about the notion of taxes and the idea of shared sacrifice being part of the fact that we determine that we are exceptional. well, the only place where american exceptionalism is embedded is the idea of individual schisms and individuals are exceptional because they work hard and now nobody wants to be exceptional in the taxes. and i am individually exceptional and it does not translate to me giving money to everybody else to do something. so this is the place where the ideal of exceptionalism is broken in a way. i would say firstly that america is exceptional but exceptional only to the case that it will wo work on the problem, and what you are saying here is that is true, that we have earned it, but we don t know how to keep it. it is not brokenb, but the concept of american exceptionalism or amex. isn t that a credit card? i believe it is distorted because when we go back to the founding fathers and the old world authors off thomas paine and others who wrote about it with the values that are exceptional, and what we see with candidates romney and others they promote it as a birthright, and we are the greatest and number one, because. you deserve to be fabulous. and it is a point of demarcation, too, and that also means that there is another kind of exceptionalism. but it has drawn lines that white people are exceptional and it is racially coded at times. well, there are different ways to be exceptional in all rich equalities and we have the weakest labor movement, and we are of all rich democracies the less mobile country now, because you are more likely to stay in the station of which you are born in america than any other advanced democracy, so people cannot move up the class ladder in the country like the myth of how it was. that is the reality in the post world war period, but that is over and in that term we are no longer exceptional in the terms of the mobility. and this is where the two-sided angst of exception exceptionalism, and particularly in focusing in on the economy of it. we are the horacio al jer story, and slavery, and wealth built on the backs of unpaid labor at the same time that we are also both of them are true, and it is not that the narrative of slavery wrtakes out hor h ratio alger. well, there is an expectation that has developed over the last year, and we do have a welfare state. there is an expectation that the government can take care of you, a and this is why we are so discombobulated here, because we are moving from one thing to another, and it is uncomfortable shift. so there is no doubt that we are moving into a time when the government is going to do less for people, and it is going to ask more from people, and that is simple math of the budget, and people, and the thing that is going to be pulling america out of this is more self-reliance of individuals, but they have not gotten the message yet, and lot of people haven t anyway that you are on your own and no poll politician is going to tell the them that and they are feed iing them a l in this campaign that some new policy in washington will fix your problem. it is not going to happen. let me pause on this, because this is counter to what the president said yesterday. yesterday he said, and this might be the thing that makes us exceptional relative to the european economic crisis is that america has a political solution to our economic crisis, and he talked about the need to be spending at the state and the local level, and if we have a second, let s take a listen to that. where we are seeing the weaknesses in the economy have to do with the state and the local government. oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government. all right. so the story is there, there is a solution, and if we increase federal tax revenues we push the money down to the states and states are hiring and then people can, right, pull themselves up. we are at a point right now where as you mention ed the anxiety and in a certain sense people are afraid. we are in a age of globalization, and the age of terrorism, and you know, age in which the face of america has been changing, and those are understood lying causes why we do have a sense of anxiety, and last month time magazine found that 71% of americans thought that the greatest days were behind us. so people are reaching out for the notion of exceptionalism as something to hang on to so as not to hang on to it. and it is a european attitude, right? it is the attitude of the former great imperial empires. we will continue the discussion of american exceptionalism because there is a lot to say. before we do that i want to address fine gate, and i want to talk about president obama s so-called gaffe when he talked in the economic speech yesterday about the private sector doing fine. i think that he meant it. i think that a lot of times we need to hear politicians when they say what they say, they mean it. that is up next. unner,marathon r in absolute perfect physical condition and i had a heart attack right out of the clear blue. he was just. get me an aspirin . yeah. i knew that i was doing the right thing, when i gave him the bayer. i m on an aspirin regimen. and i take bayer chewables. [ male announcer ] aspirin is not appropriate for everyone so be sure to talk to your doctor before you begin an aspirin regimen. so he s a success story. [ laughs ] he s my success story. [ male announcer ] learn how to protect your heart at i am proheart on facebook. [ male announcer ] learn how to protect your heart between taking insulin and testing my blood sugar. is this part of your life? freestyle lite test strips? why, are they any. beep! wow, that hardly needs any blood! yeah. and the unique zipwik tab targets the blood and pulls it in. so easy. freestyle lite needs just a third the blood of onetouch ultra. really? yep, which is great for people who use insulin and test a lot. max and i are gonna run out and get them right now. or you can call or click today and get strips and a meter free. test easy. oops i did it again yesterday morning, the president made news with his press conference on the state of the economy, and al although he had a lot to say, many people came away focused on the president s apparent stumble, and here is what got a lot of people talking. the truth of the matter is that as i said, we have created 4.3 million jobs over the last two, 27 months, and over 800,000 just this year alone. the private sector is doing fine. president obama expressed later in the day that he was saying that we need to focus on the economy but it was quoted as a political misquote all the same, and he was not the only one handing the media a nice sound bite. here is jeb bush on thursday talking about his own presidential prospects. there s a window of opportunity, and in life for all sorts of reasons, this is probably my time. bill clinton on tuesday. i think that we need to do is find some way to avoid the fiscal cliff. i think that what it means is that they will have to extend they will have to put everything off until early next year. that rogue clinton seemingly endorsing the extension of the bush tax cuts which goes against the obama administration s opinion on the matter, and cue the reporter s and political pundits and campaign strategists in unison saying, did he say that! in nerdland when i say something off script, and counter intuitive, which is often, it is a did she say it? and it is yep, she did, and she meant it. so when bill clinton for instance speaks his mind, we do as we normally do here in nerdland instead of waving our hands in the air and say, he has gone rogue, we like to listen to the words and see if there is something interesting there, because you know what, 9 of 10 times, our president, candidate or lawmaker means what he says. we don t want political leaders who only ever say what we expect them to say or are only on messa message, and the off message moments are the most insightful and informative political conversations to be had, and you didn t catch them making a gaffe, and you heard them say ing what they meant, and here is a message to the newsmakers out there wanting to go off message and this is the forum to do it. come on the melissa harris-perry show and go rogue. coming up, remember back when then senator barack obama said that there was one american and not a red one and a blue one and a conservative and a liberal one? turns out, he was wrong. at the twilight s last gleaming lieve in thinking day and night. about your dog s nutrition. like the dual-defense antioxidants in our food that work around the clock. supporting your dog s immune system on the inside. while helping to keep his skin and coat healthy on the outside. with this kind of thinking going into our food. imagine all the goodness that can come out of it. just one way we re making the world a better place. one pet at a time. purina one smartblend. our cloud is made of bedrock. concrete. and steel. our cloud is the smartest brains combating the latest security threats. it spans oceans, stretches continents. and is scalable as far as the mind can see. our cloud is the cloud other clouds look up to. welcome to the uppernet. despite our deep differences on policy issues american voters have traditionally shared substantial agreement on the core national values and the vision of the unified america is at the heart of the statement of then state senator barack obama at the 2004 democratic nastiona convention. the pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states, red states for republicans, and blue states for democrats. there is not a liberal america and a conservative america. there is the united states of america. well, actually, new data suggests that americans are more divided than we have been in the last 25 years. and the widest divide that separates us according the a pugh research center report poll released this week is not age, gender, race or class, but take a look at those, because they are actually stable over the years, and what has changed is the widest of all of the goals that divide us are the political ideology, and the pugh researchers found that the gap between the political parties has doubled. and the increase of the divide happened in the presidencies of george w. bush and barack obama. still here with me anthea butler, professor at the university of pennsylvania and raoul reyes, and dorian lord, assistant professor of columbia university and rick warren who is a reporter for the u.s. world news and report. so you have i don t want a communist in the school or what, but these data predicting what you are based on the partisanship troubles me. and what we know from the congressional roll call data about the polarization of members of congress which is more polarized now than any time since the civil war. both in terms of the political elites, but also in the mass opinion, because we have a deep, deep partisan divide that we have not seen in a long, long tim time. i notice that you said divide and the data is showing that the divide is more like this, at the elite level, it is driven almost like the right moving to the right, but it is not quite what is happening in the public opinion data, and ordinary peop people, it does seem to go like this. in terms of the parties, the dell crats ha democrats have moved to the center and the republicans are further and further to the right, so it is not a shift to the far right, and we have a major political candidate with views that many americans would consider extreme, and he is a mainstream candidate for president. for me, if there is an american exceptionalism, it is that we would be able to have these kinds of disagreements but as was said, we would have overlapping factions and any one identity being from the south or the north or black or white would not tell you everything that you need to know about the person, but somehow, it is like the idea that that is falling away feels like the certain end of the exception. and we are missing the civics. and nobody is talking about the civic engagement and what that means. so you have a hard shift to the right, and they say i am more exceptional than everybody else, but we are not experiencing a shared experience in the civic engagement which means that the language is harder and more entrenched and you can t have a conversation and you are more harsh. so we don t have anybody who engages in civic engage mement anymore and it is about not how to have a conversation to share things, but which party is going to win, and are they going to win. and so can there be an opportunity for the what makes us exceptional and exceptionalism as americans? no. [ laughter ] the numbers on the charts and the one thing not on there is the decline in living standards and the stagnation, and the decline in real incomes. we are all perplexed about why this is happening, and we now have a unified national cause it has been going on for a decade. it is not doing it for now, and we clear ly had the cause after 9/11 and iraq is differently, and nobody is unified about terrorism, and people complain about the taking the shoes off to get on the airplane and this is hardly a major inconvenience to protect people. people are more scared about the decline in their own lives and not theoretical and they feel it and know they are not getting ahead, and when you are stagnated and put down, you look around to say whose fault is it, and that is a big factor here. you talked about self-reliance, but you can t have self-reliance without somebody telling you what to do. you can t have a card of self-reliance to tell people to go do what you need to do but the line is falling and it is good luck with that, spongebob. and it is not that, you don t have the money and can t pay the bills and you can t have a conversation of you need to be self-reliant, because part of this has to be done with governmental intervention, and if i want to have anything happen, can t we bring back the wpa? can t we rebuild the infrastructure of the country. we don t have the money of that. from the pew poll, that is the number one thing that divides us the role and the scope of the government intervention. and going back to the years between 1945 and 1973, those are the exceptional years in america. those post war years, we were more equalized and polarized and the goal is to be less polarized and equal. and for years say for white americans, and the mainstream americans, and they were not exceptional for everybody in the pre-civil rights era, and when we see the clip of obama speaking like that, it seems like a lifetime ago. it does. i agree with you and admire that you are willing to say, no, it is not like that anymore and it is heartbreaking to me this is the reality, and the other thing that you have to remember is that when you inject people s faith-based values into the equation, it is more difficult, because when people believe something because of the faith, they won t change their minds because of the statistics or the political policy, so that makes the exceptionalism more polarized. i want to go back to the point of the feeling that part of what i heard you say that if i don t believe what the kids are doing better than i, and sure a shared struggle, but if i don t believe that it is an uptick and the kids can do better in the next generation, then i start to feelless attached to the american story, and i hear that and say, that seems right, and it is also true that the best groups that are best articulated an american exceptionalism are the groups least equal and least free and you often hear the immigrants shut away in ur u urban ghettos, and why would former slaves right after the civil war run for office in a country that enslaved them. this is impulsive american exceptionalism well, people fought for it. it is engaged on the well-being of how we feel today compared to yesterday. it is relative at the individual level. so if you are better off to dda than yesterday, then you are feeling good even if you are not as e better off than the people around you, ap you have a sense of i can get ahead and to the place where the person is next to me. it is hard to raise taxes on the rich, and it is puzzling, bun of the reasons is that people envision themselves being rich. they want to be rich. i don t want this to trickle down to me. yes. and so we are losing, and that is what we are sort of losing, and it is largely economic. people are just really frustrated they can t get ahead. they are lessen gaug engaged ab everything, and people don t care about the size of government, but that is what they are pinning the blame on. that is an aside and the scope and the function of government and we have always been divide edd about that question. you know government s role in supporting policy, and we are in favor of that. and on that issue of communities of color, we want to change back to that, and shift a little bit and talk about the enormous demographic changes. and part of the story of american exceptionalism is what does it look like? and it is very different than the america we once managed. nerdland is also going the dig deep into the oldest church, the mormon church. 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[ male announcer ] it s a network of possibilities helping you do what you do. even better. but when i was diagnosed with prostate cancer. i needed a coach. our doctor was great, but with so many tough decisions i felt lost. unitedhealthcare offered us a specially trained rn who helped us weigh and understand all our options. for me cancer was as scary as a fastball is to some of these kids. but my coach had hit that pitch before. turning data into useful answers. we re 78,000 people looking out for 70 million americans. that s health in numbers. unitedhealthcare. tonight the boston celtics face-off against the miami heat in game seven of the nba eastern conference finals and yes, you are watching the melissa harris-perry show. so if i were to ask you to think of what a boston seceltic looks like, a lot of you would picture this. that s iconic celtics player and hall of famer larry bird, but not all of you thought about him. some of you thought about this guy. and that celtics forward and team captain paul pierce. he is what the iconic celtic player looks like today. it is a lot like the way we tend tend to think about an american. the most salient image that comes to mind may not be the one that matches up to reality. the celtics are lucky that the leprechaun logo is the nod to the story of america, because they are who we picture when we hear the famous words enshrined on the statue of liberty, give me your poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free. that idea of welcoming with open arms liberty and freedom, and that ability to welcome and welcoming them has changed. according the a report from the u.s. census bureau for the majority of the children born in the united states for the first time was born to people of color. so that means that the picture of being american is browner than ever before we m. sti. with me, still the panel. and yes, the celtics are going the play the miami heat, and i was raised to hate them, because they were just not black, and the culture is not black. yes. and so you look out and similarly, what is an american is different than what we experienc experience? yes, the factoring in of the area of exceptional, you wonder how it plays out, because it is like drawing a line between people who were born here and say people who came here. i always wonder, if you were going to take it to the logical conclusion, if you were born in guam or puerto rico, are you somewhat exceptional, because you know, you are not a full citizen with full rights, but it is something to divide us from many of the immigrants who are increasingly hispanic, and not what we typically think of as the face of america. and anthea, is this what birtherism is about, and saying that i just can t believe that this guy is an american because of literally what he looks like? yeah, exactly. i will put it one step further and it is what it is, because he took the american dream and made it happen. so i think a collective tourette s gasp of oh, my god, we have a black president and went to harvard what my white kid would have and we have all of the brown people crowding us out and completely freaked everybody out and that is why he is having problems with white male working class voters, because those are the people who feel like they have been exceptional no matter how much money they made, and now the rest of the population is telling me that i m not so exceptional anymore. and i want to complicate it, because there is a classic black/white divide, and i remember that moment when president obama is speaking to joint session of congress and joe williams stands up and says you lie. and lot of people said a guy from the former confederate state standing up to tell the president he is lying, and that is old fashioned racism, but what president obama said when we pass health care we will not let latinos who are illegal immigrants and i can t remember the exact language, but illegal immigrants and we will not let them be part of it and he is in the moment raising the brown spector and then joe wilson says, you lie. there is a black/white divide and anxiety integration mushed togeth together. this is the generation of race, and the described of of the white grays and the brown milennios. and by gray, you mean, because they are aging? exactly. the republican party is 87% white, and it is for all intents and purposes a whites only party. 2% of and then michael steele. well, he is one of the 2%, right. he is one of the 2% black people in that party. and so i think that it is an older party as well. so we are seeing this generation on conflict play between the two parties and that is partly going to get to the discussion of political polarization, and older white folks trying to pull the line back for and say what they think is the sense of the american exceptionalism, and american dream, and they don t want to give access to the brown and the black folks coming up and in fact, they believe they are freeloaders and that is part of that reflected in the politics. well, i m not sure this makes us exceptional as americans, because this is precisely what europe is doing. in that sense i could start to wave the european flags, too, where germany and france. all of the imperial nations when the folks from the colonies start coming to the motherland and asking for the same social services. and this is going back to the economic insecurity, and one of the, you know, people, and again, looking for somebody to blame, and afraid and not sure what they are afraid of, a lot of people anyway, and here comes some politicians happy to exploit the fear and telling you that some immigrant is going to take your job and that is a basic fear that people have, that somebody is coming in to work for less than you do, and we have a dysfunctional immigration policy and undermining our own economy everyday because we won t let in the immigrants who are job creators, and by the way, the statistics are clear on this, the most dynamic small business owners are immigrants, the people who come here and start businesses. immigrants start businesses at a way higher proportion than people here. and we are shutting them out and saying, well, we are just going to somehow find other ways to fix the economy. it is crazy. youthful intervention, and the pie shrinks and economic anxiety increases. and u.n. monitors are investigating yet another massacre where dozens of women and children were killed. speaking of american exceptionalism, is there an american duty to intervene? we will ask about the international aspect of the exceptionalism when we come back. hi, i m phil mickelson. i ve been fortunate to win on golf s biggest stages. but when joint pain and stiffness from psoriatic arthritis hit, even the smallest things became difficult. i finally understood what serious joint pain is like. i talked to my rheumatologist and he prescribed enbrel. enbrel can help relieve pain, stiffness, and stop joint damage. because enbrel, etanercept, suppresses your immune system, it may lower your ability to fight infections. serious, sometimes fatal events including infections, tuberculosis, lymphoma, other cancers, and nervous system and blood disorders have occurred. before starting enbrel, your doctor should test you for tuberculosis and discuss whether you ve been to a region where certain fungal infections are common. don t start enbrel if you have an infection like the flu. tell your doctor if you re prone to infections, have cuts or sores, have had hepatitis b, have been treated for heart failure, or if, while on enbrel, you experience persistent fever, bruising, bleeding, or paleness. [ phil ] get back to the things that matter most. ask your rheumatologist if enbrel is right for you. [ doctor ] enbrel, the number one biolog medicine prescribed by rheumatologists. that s good morning, veggie style. hmmm. for half the calories plus veggie nutrition. could ve had a v8. the news of syria this week has been chilling. blood stains, bullet holes and shell casings were what greeted a team of u.n. observers when they reached the province of homa. and the forces are accused of slaughters men, women and children in a bombardment of heavy weaponry and executions. in the past, news abroad might want us to put the full force of people behind the defenseless people, and we are americans, and what we do. it is just another part of what makes us exceptional as john mccain suggested when he spoke thursday from the senate floor. military intervention of some kind is a prerequisite to the resolution of the conflict we want to achieve. how much more have to die? how many more before we will act? but as it turns out acting actually may not be what we do or at least that is the feeling of the majority of americans who believe that the u.s. has no responsibility to intervene in syria. back with me are anthea butler and raul reyes, and dorian lord and rick newman. we were talking about how it was the post war era and after the great world war ii and the great sacrifices of that war that we became the best most exceptional selves, and yet here we are at this moment facing what feels like a similar human rights horrors and is that the way we re-establish the exceptionalism is to step in at a a moment like this? this has been a thorny problem. the united states has not always stepped in when there have been genocides even. in the 90s we did not intervene in row wan dashgs and in the genocide there, and we watched slaughter happen in the former yugoslavia for two to three years before backing into that one, and syria is another case. on a moral sense, yes, we clearly should be doing more. this is obviously complicated involving iran and believe it or not involves the price of gas here in the united states, and if you are thinking about this like in a geostrategic sense, you are thinking that if that regime falls, it is much better for that regime to be pushed out from inside syria than for the united states to be seen as taking one regime out, and then getting stuck with the problem of imposing another. so from the strategic sense, there is a reason to stay into margins, if you will. but it is uncomfortable to watch no doubt. and that is the problem of where we are at in terms of the exceptionalism today. what we see as exceptionalism and when you flip it, other countries see it as arrogance, bullying, mettling and imperialism, and a whole negative aside to it, and we have not always been conscious of that in the historical context when you look at the countries that have had this exceptional sense inherent in them. and it does not reflect well. nazi germany thought they were exceptional and japan and the british em empire, and it can be a tricky slope. well, what you said is striking in terms of what most americans dot no favor intervention. that is the difference between now and the immediate post-war period where we were instrumental in found iing the united nations to help the world to advance peace. and remember a few years ago well, we had to be dragged into the world war ii and really about at the tacks here. and both franklin and elleear roosevelt were crucial around the issues of war, and if you look back, multilateral inintervention is a bad thing, and who tells the u.s. what we can do. this sense of the world does not tell us what we need to do and we intervene wherever we want, and act alone is a shift from the immediate post war period of people thinking that no we need to act collectively as a glee ba global order. and this is what obama needs to interact, because with the language, there are drones and the way we continue to act unilaterally. yes, yes. he is acting unilaterally every time he blows a drone over anybody, and when is the drone going over syria. coming back to what you said about setting up dick tas or the a dictators and we do that all of the time in the kun i tri. saddam hussein. yes. and in all of these cases, do you see the humanitarian problems, and one of the worst things on clinton s administration is rwanda, and like you said we may see it again with bosnia and others like you said, and i feel myself torn, because i don t want to see the children s bodies with the holes in the abdomens. nobody does. nobody does. right. at the same is time how much of that do we have to see and what does it mean for us to intervene? think of the other ways to intervention that doesn t mean we have to drop a bomb on anybody. but ralph s point of our exceptionalism and our position to human rights internationally have been part of what is pressing civil rights at home. and it has allowed jim crow to and we are going to the u.n. and we are going to the u.n. to talk about it. we don t sign on to the world s international rights, and so we don t want to be held accountable, and it is easy to that is just other people s problems or we don t have the resources, it feels like, and we are the one remaining superpower. and do we have the resources? because i feel that the united states feels that in some instances we are above the law and we do what we want to do and wherever we want to do it. and usually when the oil is involved, but in other situations we opt out, and that is a terrible basis for the foreign policy. and how do you lead in the world right now. one of the things that we saw in the last year or two is the uprisings in the middle east. and it is great that egypt got rid of mubarak without us. and there was an indigenous uprising in egypt as khadafy disappeared. but we want to not be mettling, but help out. it is a tricky problem, and the question comes down to humility. humility is a component of great leadership and also very rare in leadership. and we are trying to, you know, how do we lead in a way that demonstrates some humility not to be arrogant. arrogant will bite us in the rear end all of the time, and we will try to figure out how to manage this. i love this idea that we land here at this moment saying perhaps that the thing that could make us most exceptional in this moment is to be exceptionally humble in our international world. how about powerfully humble. i want a t-shirt that says powerfully humble, american exceptionalism that you can believe in. thank you rick newman and the rest of you are going to stick around for a little bit. coming up, it is one of the fastest growing religions in the united states, but half of americans don t know about it. next nerdland is going to study up on the mormon faith. cuban cajun raw seafood pizza parlor french fondue tex-mex fro-yo tapas puck chinese takeout taco truck free range chicken pancake stack baked alaska 5% cashback. signup for 5% cashback at restaurants through june. it pays to discover. we are back and changing course in the conversation on american exceptionalism. you see, there is one religion that makes a strong theological claim that america is exceptional. the church of jesus christ of latter day saints also known as the mormon church believes that america is the holy land and yet so few americans knows about the religion. 50% of nonmormons know little or nothing about the religion, and 30% of those surveyed said that the mormon faith is not a christian religion and 40% of the people said they would feel somewhat or uncomfortable with a mormon president, but the lds church is among the fastest growing religions in the world boasting 14.4 million members and growing. 6 million of which are american citizens with 8 million converts in asia, africa and around the globe. there are 55,410 mormon missionaries dispatch eed at 43 missions around the world, and teach ing t teaching the world about their religion and convince ogers this to join the fold. but the mormon faith was born here on american soil in 1827 the year that the religion s founder and prophet joseph smith found the book of mormon written on golden plates. he spends years translating the tablets. 1841, the year that smith leaves the followers in missouri, the place to be the faith s promised land. in 1838, missouri s governor orders the mormons expelled from the state or exterminated if necessary making the wandering pioneers out of the mormon faith faithful. and then joseph smith announcs s his candidacy for the president of the united states and that campaign ended with his assassination that year leading to brigham young taking over as the presiding member of the church, and so that is how they ended nup ut ed up in utah afte taken over by brigham young. and still to this day, the faith is led by 12 white men who make up a quorum of apostles and serve as counsels of the church. led by one prophet of the lds church who today is thomas monson and then one more, one member of the church who hopes to be president of the united states, and will be the first mormon nominee of a major political party who would rather we didn t focus on the religion in the campaign, but whose candidacy shines a bright spotlight on the relatively young and largely unknown faith. so when we come back, i have a table full of mormons ark and m are are going to separate fact from fiction. it is going to be fun. come on back. and we dream up all the best stuff and we can make it up cause we were made for each other for always oh oh for always a living, breathing intelligence helping business, do more business. in here, opportunities are created and protected. gonna need more wool! demand is instantly recognized and securely acted on across the company. around the world. turning a new trend, into a global phenomenon. it s the at&t network securing a world of new opportunities. this week, brigham young university professor spencer flewman wrote an op-ed in the new york times explaining why we quote fear mormons and the responses were flooding in. i had a good time reading the article and the response pieces. making the mormons look bad makes others feel good by imagining them as intolerant boobs or deviants. this intolerance is at the center of the mormon history. right now we are in what could be described as a mormon moment dawning as the faith enters the mainstream. there was once only donny and marie, but now there is an ir rev rebt broadway musical the book of mormon and the symbolism heavy twilight series, and of course, the republican president nominee mitt romney. let s unpack the mormon myths and to do that is the man who started the conversation is spencer flewman and joanna brook brooks the senior correspondent for the dispatches, and the book mormon girl and dorian lord who is a s a sassistant profess political science at columbia university. thank you for being here and i m thrilled to have this conservation. spencer, i want to start with you, because i found the piece in the new york times to be incredibly useful for creating a frame of the issue is that the people like to pick apart all of the so-called weird beliefs or the troubling practices, because it helps us to feel better about ourselves. well, i think that the premise i started with both the op-ed and the book is that we would not seek to understand anti-semitism by looking at jewish strangeness and misbehavior. it is understainteresting to understand the anti-side we are not looking at the thank is discriminated against and nobody wants to paint mormons as innocent victims just for the sake of being picked on, but still it does not tell us a lot about the american culture and the tensions of american culture. for me it is the tensions of the religion and the public sphere and how should religion function in the public sphere, and mormonism has been a surrogate for the conversation for a very long time. and in part, but a it is the uniquely american religion and we have been talking a about the american exceptionalism, and there is this theory of theology embedded in the latter day of saints theology and we have in the church s articles of faith the literal gathering of israel and the rest roioration of the tribes and that zion, the new jerusalem, will be built upon the american continue nen. so there is a typical space that is so surprising me about the idea that americans know so little, and i mean, this is the jazz of religion, right, as the american version. yes, absolutely. the mormon moment is a moment in which america is finding out how little it knows about the 6 million mormons who live here in every state, every walk of life. it is a moment for us to really tell our story, and the question that spencer has raised is what kind of conversations are we having about mormonism, and contributing substantially to the public discourse about religion in general and asking the questions that matter and getting hung up on the unfamiliar aspects of the religion. and tell me a little bit, as we are thinking about the question of the big misconceptions, what is it that is happening and maybe you also want to reveal why you get to be at the table of mormons, but i m interested of why we get interested in the little so-called beliefs or the odd practices. well, first awi was baptizeds a mormon in the chicago southside and there are black mormons on the south side of chicago. yes. and it is part of the unknown as well. so, all we know are oh that mormons have the strange practices around say wives or, you know, popular culture contributes to this a lot and tv shows that glorify certain aspect aspects of certain myths of the religion, so it is the unknown and people really don t want to know more about the church. you know, it is also one of the wealthiest churches in the kun t country and in the world, and there is a reason for that, but americans don t want to know. and we put down blinders and say, they are not christian. they are somewhere over there. they have another book in addition to the bible. we don t know what that is all about. so i think that, you know, in such an evangelical country, we resist wanting to know about the other. and the usefulness to me about this idea is that in part, part of why we resisted is if we were to take our own sets of beliefs and whatever one s holy book is and the origin myths are, and set it down outside of faith, and read it as if it were this is what sort of happened on this day, i m not sure that, you know, pregnant virgins or stone tablets or anymore weird or odd or extraordinary than any other set of beliefs that are part of sort of faith claims. well, there are two things going on here. one is that americans don t know a lot about any faith other than their own and not just a problem with mormonism, and thinking of a great book called religious illiteracy, and americans practice faith more than western europe countries practice faith, but know less about everyone else s faith than the europeans do. and so religious illiteracy is an american problem that relates not only to mormonism, but other faiths as well. that is interesting giving how religious we are compared to europe. well, it is surprising. and also the fact that mormons are not telling our own stories in the mainstreams. our stories are told by nonmo nonmormons, and the book of mormon, and the south park creators and the musical, and it is generally a friendly depiction and sweet on mo mormons, but it is about sacrificing to build the community and being willing to be different for a good reason and holding yourself to the high ideals, and that is a story that the mormon moment will bring out unless we are fixated on the weirdness. i appreciate your talking about telling our own stories which we will do in the next segment, but as i read the forthcoming book, i loved the story of being a little kid and going to the birthday parties and needing to ask for the root beer instead of the coke, because lds does not, and people who are in latter day saints and who are practicing do not drink coffee, tea or colas. there is some backsliding, because a lot of us have the diet dr. pepper in the morning, and the mormon coffee. it is true. i love the idea of being a kid and navigating the practices, just this idea of what it means to be a kid who is different, and besides the belief, itself, and i thought, that i can relate to and that i get is the idea of being a different kid in that space. when i went into a room as a kid, i could tell, i grew up in southern california and not utah or the bosom of zion in utah, but that taught me to take responsibility of the living differently and living to the higher cause and i believe that experience of being different gives the mormons something powerful to draw from and it should, it should oblige us to think about the experience to think of people who are disadvantaged and marginalized and left out. that is how i experienced the faith. and we have a lot more the say, and speaking of the personal narratives, i will pull out the personal stock, because i am a mormon family, and i get to be at the table as well. that is coming up. i needed a coach. our doctor was great, but with so many tough decisions i felt lost. unitedhealthcare offered us a specially trained rn who helped us weigh and understand all our options. for me cancer was as scary as a fastball is to some of these kids. but my coach had hit that pitch before. turning data into useful answers. we re 78,000 people looking out for 70 million americans. that s health in numbers. unitedhealthcare. perhaps you have heard me mention this before. i come from mormon stock, and my father is a black man raised in the jim crow south and he is a direct descendent of a slave sold on a richmond street corner in virginia, but my maternal line is mormon and my great, great grand father was an englishman who converted to the faith and traveled to salt lake, utah. another member of my family is from the same generation served time in prison after he refused to give up his multiple wives when utah a made the change from territory to statehood and polygamy became illegal. my own mother was raised as a mormon and attended and graduated from brigham young universi university. i was never raised through the lds church, but through my family have come to learn a great deal about the history of the churchp, and also the persecution of so many religious groups before the mormons have faced. back at the table, we have jay spencer phluman and now we are joined by matt visor who as we know from the boston globe does not have a secret mormon stock to tell us about, and dorian lord, and joe anna. joanna, i want the drive your t attention to one point that i read last night and i know that i will get in trouble about talking about this, but you were talking about the black mormons and the very clear racist practices within the church, and you write, these are the unspoken legacies we inherit when we belong to a people. not only luminous visions of eternal expanses of love and kindness, but actual human histories of exclusion and rank prejudi prejudice. i thought, that s it. that when we are part of a people, we take it all. we talking about american exceptionalism, and we are both this extraordinary american nation full of goodness, and we are americans who still to this day write benefit from the realities of the slavery and jim crow, and talk to me about how we can in public space make that kind of narrative a way to discuss the problematic histories of the church? i was raised a as mormon to believe in a god that was with just, loving, powerful, and also raised in a church that when i was 7 years old only started to give the priesthood to men of african decent. that is a huge contradiction, because every mormon has a bundle of contradictions in this country, and how we deliberate the contradictions gives us the moral bearing and that is what religion does is to help us find our own moral bearings to deal with the business of the country that needs to be ironed out. it is an important discussion in the election year. it feels complicated, because these are not small points. no. it is not like, all religions behave that way. on one hand, yes, all religions behave that way, but for me right now my big issue with the mormon church is not theological or historical, but proposition 8 which i continue to see as exclusionary. but the mormon church is quintessentially american, and it reflects other american institutions and patriarchal institution and racial exclusion and when you get to the politics, remember that the church opposed equal rights amendments in the oo 70s in the rolef of the women and walk us up to the proposition 8 and being against same-sex marriage in california that comes out of the practice of the church in the sense of what people believe. in that sense, it is reflective of other american institutions and not unique in that sense. i would like to add, to, and this is a very good point dorian, and the stereotype runs that mormons are racist, an unintended consequence of the stereotype is that it neglects the change in the modern mormon church, but the other thing that it puts in the background black mormon voices. as you said in the outset, there are black mormons and the stereotype that mormons are racist, it erases the presence of the reality of black mormonism. go right, there because i am dying to book utah s mia love on the show, and since i can t book her yet, i want to listen for a moment as the i am mormon campaign, and this is the mayor of saratoga springs, utah, mia love. i am the mayor of saratoga springs, and i love it. i get to make this life better for me and better for others. my friends from back home are saying what are you doing in utah? what they don t know is that when i cam here, i felt accepted. i m a wife. i m a mother. i m a mayor. my name is mia love. and i am mormon. fascinating, right? thatle a loa alone, i want her show, because the notion of black women as mayor is in itself interesting, but the mayor of a utah town and she, herself, mormon and standing up there to say, yes, we have this history, and i am, but here i am in the modern representation a different sort of thing. is this part of the kind of story telling that americans will need to get past their anxiety about the mormon church do you think? yeah. i think that is what the church is hoping that we have open discussions like this about the church in a context that is not sharply partisan. you know, in a way that it could become over the next couple of months particularly with mitt romney who you mentioned the i am mormon campaign and he is the ideal poster for that in some ways and the most prominent mormon that most americans are going to know about and yet he does not talk about his own faith. and he is not eager to talk about the contradictory conflicts and that is what is difficult for us to enter the mainstream is to wrestle with the conflicts and we are usual human beings trying to walk our walk with god and evolving as we can on all kinds of issues. and another unintend consequence of this race is that when i went to the mormon church in hyde park, chicago, it is one of the most integrated spaces i was in and almost everybody was liberal and progressive and my snapshot of what mormonism was, is different from the church. but if we hold out of the mormons in the u.s. house of representatives there, there is little of a handful mostly from the western states and utah and arizona and nevada, and most everybody has an r next to their names. jim matheson. don t forget harry reid. yes, moving over to the senate, that is right. and part of it is the diversity piece, and part of it is the ideological diversity piece, but that said, what i don t want to do is to let off of the hook, the ways in which the institutional church has intervened in the land of politics. so we want to talk more about that institutional political question when we come back. we are going to talk not so much about the mormon church just sort of in a vacuum and not just because the most famous mormon in america is of course running for president, but how that question of romney s faith may impact the kind of president that he is and whether or not that is a fair question, and that is up next. u trade. so we have ongoing webinars and interactive learning, plus, in-branch seminars at over 500 locations, where our dedicated support teams help you know more so your money can do more. 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why is the mormon thing seen as a problem for the romney camp, it is in fact a drag on the chances of getting to the white house? and should it be? with me is the spencer phlewman, and joanna and matt visor from the boston globe, and also our panelist from the assistant professor of columbia university. is this mormonism important to the race? well, it is important in that his family is deeply intertwined with the church. he played a prominent role in the mormon church in massachusetts. it is an important part of who the core is and the family and he and his wife share that faith. so to understand mitt romney it is important. el we, there well, there is moment at the rnc convention where barack obama s was from chicago, and bill clinton s from hope, arkansas, and there is a point where there is going to be the mormons and pushcarts going across the plains. well, the question of romney and any presidential candidate, how is the moral affects your decisions? and in that context to talk about how i understand the problems that poor people may have as a role as a counselor in my church, or in the mission to france and also, does it make you feel committed to health care for everyone or decent education for everyone or work for dignity for everyone, and how do you feel about war and torture and these questions? well, is it fair to come up to mitt romney, and say, well, ak xhully the church of latter day saints has a strong position on the social welfare and we are doing it a lot with the catholicism, and the bishops saying it is about reproductive rights and the nuns saying, no it is the budget and whether the budget is a moral and ethical document, and pat part of me wa say, mr. romney, what about the caring for the poor and the collectivism, and not the individualis individualism. well, he stands for same-sex marriage, and on immigration less conservative with the church s position on reform. yes, that is true, because it is a missionary church that brings immigrants even those from my family. and mitt romney s family, and spending time in mexico, and the great, great grandfather was in the mexico community and has relatives in the community. and it is a fair question, because it is not like the mormon church itself has not entered politics, because it has entered the political sphere and therefore game-on, and what are the positions of the church ashs and the positions of romney and do we agree and disagree with those. and it is important to understand the leadership of the church. this is not a casual mormon and when you understand lay leadership and understand the position, this is someone for whom you point out, he would have to reconcile and any position different, at a minimum reconcile it for himself, and potentially with the leadership. and i don t think that you can see, and i don t think that you can see the public persona a apart from the bitter mormonism, and white and rich and male and all of the markers of privilege and why is he hesitant on mormonism? because people are bitter. you mentioned chicago at the chicago exposition, and mormons are not invite td to the parliament of religions, but mormons celebrated at hardworking community people, and secularized picture of mormonism, but there is a long history of mormon religion not co comfortable there, and that is one way to read him, and one way to comprehend the willing neneso present a kind of putting the religion to the side there. there is a long history there. i knowly get in trouble there, but i feel like the for themons are the black folks of the republican party, and by that, i mean that the african-americans give the vote to the democratic party from the mid-century on, and 90% of african-americans going to vote for the democratic party, and there is a lot of amicus for that voting, and it seems that president obama has to run away from that, and it seems that the vast majority of the mormons are republican, but they are held at arm s length at the party. well, it is an interesting point, and i do think that, you know, you do expect and i think it is 85% or 89% of mormons support mitt romney, and it is a high number. 87% yesterday. and it is not like he has to do anything to get to moremon vote. he he has got it. but yet, he does not talk about it a whole lot. and mormons have had to republican mormons have had to stomach a lot of the anti-mormon s in the evangelicals, and that is part of the gop, and we have seen the change in the 2008, but it has been a feature of the landscape. so when this came up last time, a religious question about a president running, it was john f. kennedy, and i want to listen to how jfk addressed the catholicism. because i am a catholic and no catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in the campaign have been obscured, so it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church i believe in. for that is important only to me, but what kind of america i believe in. i believe in an america with the separation of the church and the state is absolute. so, is this dish mean, i know that romney did the 2007 version, a nd he talked at liberty college, but is he going to need the statement of the jfk? well, is he going to do it? he has a personality that as mo mormons, carefully managed statements about the faith and don t show vulnerability or humanness or the baggage, and i don t know if he is set up to make the statement. the statement that is important for him to make like jfk, what impact has the faith made on the moral bearings and the economic and the political decision-making. it is interesting that mitt romney s father participated in a biography in the 60s called george romney a mormon politician and very much identity for his father, and public part of the identity, and we haven t seen that quite from mitt romney so far. i don t know, i mean, that the campaign doesn t i don t think that they want to give a mormon speech again and they felt like they dealt with it four years ago and avoided it altogether, and like you said earlier, the convention is going to be interesting to see how much they bring up his faith and background. and not just the faith, but the parents may have a problem for him, because we are having a good time with george romney and mitt s mom who ran for senate who are decidedly to the left of the son at a time when it was harder to be to the left. george romney is on record to support rights in the pay and equity that is much more aggressive for equality of all people under the law than mitt romney. for me, there are so many good reasons to not vote for mitt romney, and that is because i m a liberal progressive, so i think that, oh, my gosh, i can make you a whole case for not voting for mitt romney, but i don t want, and i just do not want the reason that any person makes the choice not to or to vote for mitt romney to be about an anti-mormon animus, so if you are on the right, there must be a bazillion great reasons not to vote for barack obama, but none of us want the lever to be pulled because of an anti-black am us in. amminus. and that is when reverend wright was entered and he was quick to say, that is out of bounds and not as quickly to say about donald trump and barack obama s birth ser certificate, it hits him in a way of sensitivity on the religious grounds and if reverend wright comes up, it brings up a whole o other set of mitt romney and his own faith that he is not eager to have as a national discussion. thank you for joining us, panel. thank you all for being here. dorian, you want to stick around a little bit longer, because the showdown is shaping up in florida who can vote, and who shouldn t be able to vote in an election where florida might decide what happens in november. what you need to know after the break. switch to citracal maximum plus d. it s the only calcium supplement that can be taken with or without food. that s why my doctor recommends citracal maximum. it s all about absorption. that s why my doctor recommends citracal maximum. pull on those gardening gloves. and let s see how colorful an afternoon can be. with the home depot certified advice to help us expand our palette. .and prices that keep our budgets firmly rooted. .we can mix the right soil with the right ideas. .and bring even more color to any garden. more saving. more doing. that s the power of the home depot. beat the bugs with ortho bug-b-gon max spray or concentrate just $7.97. new venus & olay. olay moisture bars help lock in moisture. while five blades get venus close. revealing smooth and goddess skin begins. only from venus & olay. 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[ zapping ] [ clang ] this is the next level of performance. the next level of innovation. the next rx. the all-new f sport. this is the pursuit of perfection. major showdown is wbrewing n the all-important state of florida and remember tim russert s white board, florida, florida, florida. well, bring out the white boards, because it looks like the tightening presidential race is about the florida s 29 votes, and that is why the voter rolls are the most important part of this. scott walker nominated a plan to purge the voting rolls to purge illegitimate voters, and now he is ordered to stop that. and now the secretary of state is giving the d.o.j. his own deadline, this coming monday to explain why it is illegal to remove noncitizens from the rolls, and in a letter to the d.o.j., he writes that the department of state respecti respectively, excuse me, respectfully disagrees with the d.o.j. s action and the actions taken by florida to identify and remove non-citizens from its voter rolls ensure that the right to vote of citizens is protected and it is not diluted. and this is what attorney general eric holder had to say. the problem with florida says that it runs counter of the federal rules saying that you cannot do this 90 days within an election a yond u can , and you florida has done and in north carolina and georgia and they did it via the right way. with this showdown, the stakes may be who ends up in the white house this fall. with me now from tallahassee is ian san ccho, the leon county voting commissioner. we have multiple levels going on, the florida governor and the secretary of state fight agent the local level, and then officials like you saying that we are not going the go forward with what the state is telling us to do. tell me exactly what is going on, on the ground in florida on this issue? well, it is a complex issue, because the supervisor off electionser the local election officials don t work for the governor, and we don t work for the legislature and for the most part, we are independently elected from the counties to ensure that the process works smoothly at the county level, and decentralizeded h historically, and what the governor is trying to do is to essentially rewrite the entire process in florida at the 11th hour trying to make us, the local officials subservient to the statewide policy, but as independent political officials our own general counsel sent us a memo last week that basically said that the state is probably in violation of the national voter registration act of 1993, and as a 24-year veteran of the administration, i was around when the nvra was passed and section eight of the law does prohibit a state from conducting a systemic purge with a few exceptions within 90 days of a federal election. may 17th is that deadline. and we are past it. ion, i so appreciate your position here, because you are one of the last of the critically important breed which is to say that your issue here is not about the democratic voters or the republican voters, but it is fundamentally about the voting process, itself, and how important are the stakes for aus as a democracy, and florida s quality of elections and not just outcome of the election in terms of the voter pernlg purge going on? well, this voter purge is done for political reasons not for pragmatic reasons. i.e., it is not because they, that anyone at the state has decided that there are lots of numbers of noncitizens who are registered to vote. the governor here was elected basically as a tea party candidate. that is his self-described moniker, and quite frankly, that base believes for example that barack obama didn t even win the 2008 election, and stolen through the voter fraud. this kind of extremist view is really what is motivating, i believe, this kind of a purge at this late hour. it does fulfill a campaign promise that the governor made to his supporters to root out this systemic voter fraud which is an election official, i can tell you that quite frankly, it does not exist as a problem in the country. in the state of florida for example, there are far more public officials indicted for corruption and 781 in the last decade than there have been even arrests for voter fraud. 178 cases have been turned over to the florida department of law enforcement, and of that only 11 cases even resulted in arrest. there is no systemic problem with florida s voter registration database. this is a controversy, in my opinion made for political reasons to motivate a base in a presidential election year, and quite frankly, the threat of just using politics or any means necessary to win at any cost, i think that does threatening the very existence of this republic. ion, i cannot imagine saying it better. thank you for being with us, and giving the report from there. and undoubtedly we will continue to talk about this and continue to talk about it in the very next segment. hang out, because the experts are here at the table to learn what we have learned about ion, and this is what matters and possibly the election. come back. ck. concrete. and steel. our cloud is the smartest brains combating the latest security threats. it spans oceans, stretches continents. and is scalable as far as the mind can see. our cloud is the cloud other clouds look up to. welcome to the uppernet. who have used androgel 1%, there s big news. presenting androgel 1.62%. both are used to treat men with low testosterone. androgel 1.62% is from the makers of the number one prescribed testosterone replacement therapy. it raises your testosterone levels, and. is concentrated, so you could use less gel. and with androgel 1.62%, you can save on your monthly prescription. 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[ female announcer ] purina cat chow indoor. always there for you. retalk tact showdown in florida and the possible purging of thousands of voters off of the rolls. joining me anthea butler, and raul and judith brown and here s is my theory about the lawsuit. this supreme court and this federal judiciary terrifies me. if you guys take florida to court, is this the end of the voting rights act? no, it is not. first of all, we will be filing a lawsuit under the national voter registration act. we have to step back at what is happening here, and florida likes to be the innovators of voter suppression, and they have take page out of the republican voter playbook, and it is not just what has passed in nine states over the past two years, but also the purges. that is how you win the elections and the reason that people should care is because in 2000, it is 537 votes that the e election came to and here is 180,000 potential voters who could be purged and most ly latino, but it impacts the elderly and impacts college students, so, you know, this is a broad play that they are going for, and you know, we are going to fight it, and the d.o.j. is stepping in, and it is great that we are, you know, really anteing up, and the governor has decided to be recalcitrant. and i read an article that says he is standing in the schoolhouse door, and this idea of massive resistance, and in a purple state with 29 electoral college votes. i mean, it is one thing to do this in a state that is likely to be democrat or republican, but florida might decide the election. i have to say that i found it incredibly courageous that mr. sancho is so willing to stand up to let it out. and when you look at the purge, it is 48% hispanic, and 40% african-american. so it is blatant. and the local people say that we are not getting in part of this, because they know we will come after them, too. and this is state s rights, and what he h is trying to assert the state right to do whatever they want to do, and you can read this, because back all of them were doing it and disenfranchising people. i love for all of the state s rights language, it is the local officials who were saying, not over here. and we were talking in one of the breaks of the incredible turnout in wisconsin and we should have a discussion of how the expand the democracy and get everybody to the polls, and instead, we are forced to have this discussion and fight these battles around the voter suppression, and it is amazing to me how in the 21st century, we are having a fight over the age-old tactic of the you can t win the election, exclude people in the first place. if you can t win, because was you have a better ground game and voters choose you, fine. but if you have won because you have purged actual it citizens m the laws and changed the rules of the game, and also a partisan game, and also about undermining the democracy and cut off the participation so that the people who showed nup ed up in 2008, elderly and college students won t show up this time. and what about the minorities of the people that are sitting around the table, and how do we build the largest possible coalition? well, you have to start by fighting back and understand in the history of voting and recognize that lots of people have died so that we would have a right to vote. i remember the mtv get out the vote, and we need the same thing, but in florida they continue do it, because the league of women s voters hands are tied. don t get out the vote. everybody stay home! and yes, it is a day that at the end of the day, you should not care if you are right or left, but worry about the democracy and it is a great equalizer, but a on the election day, we have the same amount of power. that is one person, one vote. in a moment, three jersey girls who could have spent their summer at the shore, but instead, they decided to change the world. and now it is time for a preview of what is ahead with alex witt. yes. mitt romney and president obama have developed new talking lights. and gary johnson is talking about the new ad and why it is painting a gloomy picture. and the fight for the bring fascinating results of a new focus group of female voters. i ll have the another leads all the leaders. but it won t be a triple crown. don t go away. i have a great story of three fabulous teenagers. and they re jersey girls. come back, hear their story. they re our foot soldier this is week. time for the entrepreneur of the week. he topped tough mudder while at harvard business school. it s a miles long obstacle that inspires people and builds teamwork. with more than 30 events in 2012, tough mudder will earn more than $70 million. for more, watch your business sunday mornings at 7:30 on msnbc. ovider is different but centurylink is committed to being a different kind of communications company by continuing to help you do more and focus on the things that matter to you. i wish i could keep it this way. [ dr. rahmany ] after a dental cleaning, plaque quickly starts to grow back. but new crest pro-health clinical plaque control reduces plaque and is clinically proven to help keep it from coming back. new crest pro-health clinical plaque control toothpaste. last season was the gulf s best tourism season in years. in florida we had more suntans. in alabama we had more beautiful blooms. in mississippi we had more good times. in louisiana we had more fun on the water. last season we broke all kinds of records on the gulf. this year we are out to do even better. and now is a great time to start. our beatches are even more relaxing. the fishing s great. so pick your favorite spot on the gulf. and come on down. brought to you by bp and all of us who call the gulf home. our foot sedges this week are three young women, high school sophomores in the midst of taking finals who are making the case to right what they sales representative a wrong. they recently found out what any of us could have realized had we bothered to look. no woman has moderated a presidential debate since carol simpson of abc news 20 years ago. how can the issues important to women be addressed if they haven t been given the chance to ask them, asks one of the young women. and they re starting to take action, in the form of a petition on change.org which already has more than 100,000 signatures. they also have some suggestions for who the moderators can be. and let s be clear. there are plenty of women to choose from. like cnn s candy crowley who has been covering presidential politics since the nomination of jim ri carter. or lesley staal, a white house correspondent during the reagan administration. if comparable experience is of concern, consider gwynn eiffel. at the risk of sounding like a corporate shill, i ll proed proudly point to my colleague here at msnbc, andrea mitchell. our jersey girl foot soldiers are growing up when one of the icons of cool is a woman who went from first lady to senator to presidential candidate to secretary of state. and when women voters are capable of deciding national elections. but they ve never watched a woman pose her own questions in her own voice to the men who seek the nation s highest office. the fact that there hasn t been a female moderator of one of the debates in so long is just another sign that america is a long way from being as equal as it thinks it is, another one of our young women from montclair said. indeed, these students have a congress that thinks it s reasonable to discuss contraception without talking to my women and live in a country where male lawmakers make policy to peer inside women s pregnant bodies and live in a country where women still earn less than their male counterparts. shouldn t they also live in a country country where a woman has the opportunity to at least ask why. for pushing that idea forward, emma, sammy and elena are our foot soldier this is week. and that is our show for today. thank you to our panel for sticking around. thanks for watching. i m so excited about tomorrow s show. reverend al sharpton will be here and so is actress nicole parker, right here at this table. coming up, weekends with alex witt. 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[ male announcer ] because enbrel suppresses your immune system, it may lower your ability to fight infections. serious, sometimes fatal, events including infections, tuberculosis, lymphoma, other cancers, and nervous system and blood disorders have occurred. before starting enbrel, your doctor should test you for tuberculosis and discuss whether you ve been to a region where certain fungal infections are common. don t start enbrel if you have an infection like the flu. tell your doctor if you re prone to infections, have cuts or sores, have had hepatitis b, have been treated for heart failure, or if, while on enbrel, you experience persistent fever, bruising, bleeding, or paleness. if you ve had enough, ask your dermatologist about enbrel. high noon here in the east, 9:00 a.m. out west. welcome to weekends with alex witt. here areom
then the scott walker recall in wisconsin, and that was a battle state where the rules of engagement had been changing, and bill clinton forgets the rules of being a surrogate, and do not directly disagree with the candidate, and saying that bush tax cuts should be extended when the president does not think so. so after a week of being on the defense, he decided to be on offense and he showed up in the briefing room to talk about the economy, and we all tuned in to see what he had to say about the american economy, except he talked a lot about some place else. right now, one concern is europe which faces a threat of renewed recession as countries deal with a financial crisis. if there s less demand for our products in places like paris or madrid, it could mean less businesses or less business for manufacturers in pittsburgh or milwaukee. hmm. when was the last time you heard an american president mention pittsburgh and milwaukee in the same sentence as, you know, paris and madrid? you know, it does not happen often, because in america we tend to think of ourselves as separate and apart from the rest of the world, and separated by more than just vast oceans, but also set apart with the special history, and the shining city on the hill, and americans like to think that we are exceptional, but here is president obama complicating the story a little bit. he is a patriot who reinforces the uniqueness, but yesterday the president admitted that we are interconnected. that when it comes to the economy, the fate of one is in fact tied to the fate of all. now, that is of course the kind of thinking that could get you voted out of the white house, because the rival mitt romney has cast an american exceptionalism that sees the country not only as apart, but above as a litmus test for leadership. we knew without question that there was extraordinary exceptional and special to be american. our president doesn t have the same feelings about american exceptionalism that we do. from the time the continental congress first called our states united, american exceptionalism has served as the binding identity and a standard for america, and even for those who criticized the country for the failure to live up to it, frederick douglass, susan anthony, martin luther king jr. all relied on america as a special place even as they press ed for change and think of it as a revolutionary narcissism, and now we are confronted with one of the kocornerstones of which have built the idea of america, and that the exceptionalism is derived from the economic power, and maybe that we are just as ordinary as the rest of the world, an indeed all of the bedrocks of the self-understanding are singular political ideology, and the military might have shifted and with them are the long held beliefs of what makes them exceptional may be fading which is okay, if it leads us to be more responsible and tolerant and global in the world, but the divergence of the american exceptionalism may sever the last threads of national identity that bind us together which is why this presidential e election may be presenting us with more than obvious decision and not just one between president obama and governor mitt romney, but a choice to reimagine and redefine what makes us exceptional now. joining me around the table anthea butler, and graduate of the eugenia university of pennsylvania, and also our latino contributor dorian lord, and also professor of scientific affairs and fellow at the roosevelt institute, and rick newman who is chief correspondent for the u.s. world news and report, and also author of rebound eers how you pivot from setback to success. thank you for being on the show. american exceptionalism as it is rooted in the economy, and are we in a place to make a claim for the exceptional economy? what is happening now is that we are basically redefining what it means to be american. we have gone from being on the toch heap to this whole sense of decline, and we don t know where we are headed. what is difference now is that this sense of american exceptionalism is something that america earned throughout the history in many ways throughout the 1800s and the industrial revolution and all of the great companies built that were the economic engine of the world and the 1800s and the world war ii and leadership and sacrifice associated with that and hard work and excellent leadership. we earned it, and now it seems that we have a sense of entitlement to it. so i think that we have sort of drifted from something that we earned to something that we expect. that is the problem. i i find that to be a really useful intervention, this idea that it is not bestowed upon us but that we earn it, and it does make me wonder about the notion of taxes and the idea of shared sacrifice being part of the fact that we determine that we are exceptional. well, the only place where american exceptionalism is embedded is the idea of individual schisms and individuals are exceptional because they work hard and now nobody wants to be exceptional in the taxes. and i am individually exceptional and it does not translate to me giving money to everybody else to do something. so this is the place where the ideal of exceptionalism is broken in a way. i would say firstly that america is exceptional but exceptional only to the case that it will wo work on the problem, and what you are saying here is that is true, that we have earned it, but we don t know how to keep it. it is not brokenb, but the concept of american exceptionalism or amex. isn t that a credit card? i believe it is distorted because when we go back to the founding fathers and the old world authors off thomas paine and others who wrote about it with the values that are exceptional, and what we see with candidates romney and others they promote it as a birthright, and we are the greatest and number one, because. you deserve to be fabulous. and it is a point of demarcation, too, and that also means that there is another kind of exceptionalism. but it has drawn lines that white people are exceptional and it is racially coded at times. well, there are different ways to be exceptional in all rich equalities and we have the weakest labor movement, and we are of all rich democracies the less mobile country now, because you are more likely to stay in the station of which you are born in america than any other advanced democracy, so people cannot move up the class ladder in the country like the myth of how it was. that is the reality in the post world war period, but that is over and in that term we are no longer exceptional in the terms of the mobility. and this is where the two-sided angst of exception exceptionalism, and particularly in focusing in on the economy of it. we are the horacio al jer story, and slavery, and wealth built on the backs of unpaid labor at the same time that we are also both of them are true, and it is not that the narrative of slavery wrtakes out hor h ratio alger. well, there is an expectation that has developed over the last year, and we do have a welfare state. there is an expectation that the government can take care of you, a and this is why we are so discombobulated here, because we are moving from one thing to another, and it is uncomfortable shift. so there is no doubt that we are moving into a time when the government is going to do less for people, and it is going to ask more from people, and that is simple math of the budget, and people, and the thing that is going to be pulling america out of this is more self-reliance of individuals, but they have not gotten the message yet, and lot of people haven t anyway that you are on your own and no poll politician is going to tell the them that and they are feed iing them a l in this campaign that some new policy in washington will fix your problem. it is not going to happen. let me pause on this, because this is counter to what the president said yesterday. yesterday he said, and this might be the thing that makes us exceptional relative to the european economic crisis is that america has a political solution to our economic crisis, and he talked about the need to be spending at the state and the local level, and if we have a second, let s take a listen to that. where we are seeing the weaknesses in the economy have to do with the state and the local government. oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government. all right. so the story is there, there is a solution, and if we increase federal tax revenues we push the money down to the states and states are hiring and then people can, right, pull themselves up. we are at a point right now where as you mention ed the anxiety and in a certain sense people are afraid. we are in a age of globalization, and the age of terrorism, and you know, age in which the face of america has been changing, and those are understood lying causes why we do have a sense of anxiety, and last month time magazine found that 71% of americans thought that the greatest days were behind us. so people are reaching out for the notion of exceptionalism as something to hang on to so as not to hang on to it. and it is a european attitude, right? it is the attitude of the former great imperial empires. we will continue the discussion of american exceptionalism because there is a lot to say. before we do that i want to address fine gate, and i want to talk about president obama s so-called gaffe when he talked in the economic speech yesterday about the private sector doing fine. i think that he meant it. i think that a lot of times we need to hear politicians when they say what they say, they mean it. that is up next. unner,marathon r in absolute perfect physical condition and i had a heart attack right out of the clear blue. he was just. get me an aspirin . yeah. i knew that i was doing the right thing, when i gave him the bayer. i m on an aspirin regimen. and i take bayer chewables. 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oops i did it again yesterday morning, the president made news with his press conference on the state of the economy, and al although he had a lot to say, many people came away focused on the president s apparent stumble, and here is what got a lot of people talking. the truth of the matter is that as i said, we have created 4.3 million jobs over the last two, 27 months, and over 800,000 just this year alone. the private sector is doing fine. president obama expressed later in the day that he was saying that we need to focus on the economy but it was quoted as a political misquote all the same, and he was not the only one handing the media a nice sound bite. here is jeb bush on thursday talking about his own presidential prospects. there s a window of opportunity, and in life for all sorts of reasons, this is probably my time. bill clinton on tuesday. i think that we need to do is find some way to avoid the fiscal cliff. i think that what it means is that they will have to extend they will have to put everything off until early next year. that rogue clinton seemingly endorsing the extension of the bush tax cuts which goes against the obama administration s opinion on the matter, and cue the reporter s and political pundits and campaign strategists in unison saying, did he say that! in nerdland when i say something off script, and counter intuitive, which is often, it is a did she say it? and it is yep, she did, and she meant it. so when bill clinton for instance speaks his mind, we do as we normally do here in nerdland instead of waving our hands in the air and say, he has gone rogue, we like to listen to the words and see if there is something interesting there, because you know what, 9 of 10 times, our president, candidate or lawmaker means what he says. we don t want political leaders who only ever say what we expect them to say or are only on messa message, and the off message moments are the most insightful and informative political conversations to be had, and you didn t catch them making a gaffe, and you heard them say ing what they meant, and here is a message to the newsmakers out there wanting to go off message and this is the forum to do it. come on the melissa harris-perry show and go rogue. coming up, remember back when then senator barack obama said that there was one american and not a red one and a blue one and a conservative and a liberal one? turns out, he was wrong. at the twilight s last gleaming lieve in thinking day and night. about your dog s nutrition. like the dual-defense antioxidants in our food that work around the clock. supporting your dog s immune system on the inside. while helping to keep his skin and coat healthy on the outside. with this kind of thinking going into our food. imagine all the goodness that can come out of it. just one way we re making the world a better place. one pet at a time. purina one smartblend. our cloud is made of bedrock. concrete. and steel. our cloud is the smartest brains combating the latest security threats. it spans oceans, stretches continents. and is scalable as far as the mind can see. our cloud is the cloud other clouds look up to. welcome to the uppernet. despite our deep differences on policy issues american voters have traditionally shared substantial agreement on the core national values and the vision of the unified america is at the heart of the statement of then state senator barack obama at the 2004 democratic nastiona convention. the pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states, red states for republicans, and blue states for democrats. there is not a liberal america and a conservative america. there is the united states of america. well, actually, new data suggests that americans are more divided than we have been in the last 25 years. and the widest divide that separates us according the a pugh research center report poll released this week is not age, gender, race or class, but take a look at those, because they are actually stable over the years, and what has changed is the widest of all of the goals that divide us are the political ideology, and the pugh researchers found that the gap between the political parties has doubled. and the increase of the divide happened in the presidencies of george w. bush and barack obama. still here with me anthea butler, professor at the university of pennsylvania and raoul reyes, and dorian lord, assistant professor of columbia university and rick warren who is a reporter for the u.s. world news and report. so you have i don t want a communist in the school or what, but these data predicting what you are based on the partisanship troubles me. and what we know from the congressional roll call data about the polarization of members of congress which is more polarized now than any time since the civil war. both in terms of the political elites, but also in the mass opinion, because we have a deep, deep partisan divide that we have not seen in a long, long tim time. i notice that you said divide and the data is showing that the divide is more like this, at the elite level, it is driven almost like the right moving to the right, but it is not quite what is happening in the public opinion data, and ordinary peop people, it does seem to go like this. in terms of the parties, the dell crats ha democrats have moved to the center and the republicans are further and further to the right, so it is not a shift to the far right, and we have a major political candidate with views that many americans would consider extreme, and he is a mainstream candidate for president. for me, if there is an american exceptionalism, it is that we would be able to have these kinds of disagreements but as was said, we would have overlapping factions and any one identity being from the south or the north or black or white would not tell you everything that you need to know about the person, but somehow, it is like the idea that that is falling away feels like the certain end of the exception. and we are missing the civics. and nobody is talking about the civic engagement and what that means. so you have a hard shift to the right, and they say i am more exceptional than everybody else, but we are not experiencing a shared experience in the civic engagement which means that the language is harder and more entrenched and you can t have a conversation and you are more harsh. so we don t have anybody who engages in civic engage mement anymore and it is about not how to have a conversation to share things, but which party is going to win, and are they going to win. and so can there be an opportunity for the what makes us exceptional and exceptionalism as americans? no. [ laughter ] the numbers on the charts and the one thing not on there is the decline in living standards and the stagnation, and the decline in real incomes. we are all perplexed about why this is happening, and we now have a unified national cause it has been going on for a decade. it is not doing it for now, and we clear ly had the cause after 9/11 and iraq is differently, and nobody is unified about terrorism, and people complain about the taking the shoes off to get on the airplane and this is hardly a major inconvenience to protect people. people are more scared about the decline in their own lives and not theoretical and they feel it and know they are not getting ahead, and when you are stagnated and put down, you look around to say whose fault is it, and that is a big factor here. you talked about self-reliance, but you can t have self-reliance without somebody telling you what to do. you can t have a card of self-reliance to tell people to go do what you need to do but the line is falling and it is good luck with that, spongebob. and it is not that, you don t have the money and can t pay the bills and you can t have a conversation of you need to be self-reliant, because part of this has to be done with governmental intervention, and if i want to have anything happen, can t we bring back the wpa? can t we rebuild the infrastructure of the country. we don t have the money of that. from the pew poll, that is the number one thing that divides us the role and the scope of the government intervention. and going back to the years between 1945 and 1973, those are the exceptional years in america. those post war years, we were more equalized and polarized and the goal is to be less polarized and equal. and for years say for white americans, and the mainstream americans, and they were not exceptional for everybody in the pre-civil rights era, and when we see the clip of obama speaking like that, it seems like a lifetime ago. it does. i agree with you and admire that you are willing to say, no, it is not like that anymore and it is heartbreaking to me this is the reality, and the other thing that you have to remember is that when you inject people s faith-based values into the equation, it is more difficult, because when people believe something because of the faith, they won t change their minds because of the statistics or the political policy, so that makes the exceptionalism more polarized. i want to go back to the point of the feeling that part of what i heard you say that if i don t believe what the kids are doing better than i, and sure a shared struggle, but if i don t believe that it is an uptick and the kids can do better in the next generation, then i start to feelless attached to the american story, and i hear that and say, that seems right, and it is also true that the best groups that are best articulated an american exceptionalism are the groups least equal and least free and you often hear the immigrants shut away in ur u urban ghettos, and why would former slaves right after the civil war run for office in a country that enslaved them. this is impulsive american exceptionalism well, people fought for it. it is engaged on the well-being of how we feel today compared to yesterday. it is relative at the individual level. so if you are better off to dda than yesterday, then you are feeling good even if you are not as e better off than the people around you, ap you have a sense of i can get ahead and to the place where the person is next to me. it is hard to raise taxes on the rich, and it is puzzling, bun of the reasons is that people envision themselves being rich. they want to be rich. i don t want this to trickle down to me. yes. and so we are losing, and that is what we are sort of losing, and it is largely economic. people are just really frustrated they can t get ahead. they are lessen gaug engaged ab everything, and people don t care about the size of government, but that is what they are pinning the blame on. that is an aside and the scope and the function of government and we have always been divide edd about that question. you know government s role in supporting policy, and we are in favor of that. and on that issue of communities of color, we want to change back to that, and shift a little bit and talk about the enormous demographic changes. and part of the story of american exceptionalism is what does it look like? and it is very different than the america we once managed. nerdland is also going the dig deep into the oldest church, the mormon church. 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[ male announcer ] it s a network of possibilities helping you do what you do. even better. but when i was diagnosed with prostate cancer. i needed a coach. our doctor was great, but with so many tough decisions i felt lost. unitedhealthcare offered us a specially trained rn who helped us weigh and understand all our options. for me cancer was as scary as a fastball is to some of these kids. but my coach had hit that pitch before. turning data into useful answers. we re 78,000 people looking out for 70 million americans. that s health in numbers. unitedhealthcare. tonight the boston celtics face-off against the miami heat in game seven of the nba eastern conference finals and yes, you are watching the melissa harris-perry show. so if i were to ask you to think of what a boston seceltic looks like, a lot of you would picture this. that s iconic celtics player and hall of famer larry bird, but not all of you thought about him. some of you thought about this guy. and that celtics forward and team captain paul pierce. he is what the iconic celtic player looks like today. it is a lot like the way we tend tend to think about an american. the most salient image that comes to mind may not be the one that matches up to reality. the celtics are lucky that the leprechaun logo is the nod to the story of america, because they are who we picture when we hear the famous words enshrined on the statue of liberty, give me your poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free. that idea of welcoming with open arms liberty and freedom, and that ability to welcome and welcoming them has changed. according the a report from the u.s. census bureau for the majority of the children born in the united states for the first time was born to people of color. so that means that the picture of being american is browner than ever before we m. sti. with me, still the panel. and yes, the celtics are going the play the miami heat, and i was raised to hate them, because they were just not black, and the culture is not black. yes. and so you look out and similarly, what is an american is different than what we experienc experience? yes, the factoring in of the area of exceptional, you wonder how it plays out, because it is like drawing a line between people who were born here and say people who came here. i always wonder, if you were going to take it to the logical conclusion, if you were born in guam or puerto rico, are you somewhat exceptional, because you know, you are not a full citizen with full rights, but it is something to divide us from many of the immigrants who are increasingly hispanic, and not what we typically think of as the face of america. and anthea, is this what birtherism is about, and saying that i just can t believe that this guy is an american because of literally what he looks like? yeah, exactly. i will put it one step further and it is what it is, because he took the american dream and made it happen. so i think a collective tourette s gasp of oh, my god, we have a black president and went to harvard what my white kid would have and we have all of the brown people crowding us out and completely freaked everybody out and that is why he is having problems with white male working class voters, because those are the people who feel like they have been exceptional no matter how much money they made, and now the rest of the population is telling me that i m not so exceptional anymore. and i want to complicate it, because there is a classic black/white divide, and i remember that moment when president obama is speaking to joint session of congress and joe williams stands up and says you lie. and lot of people said a guy from the former confederate state standing up to tell the president he is lying, and that is old fashioned racism, but what president obama said when we pass health care we will not let latinos who are illegal immigrants and i can t remember the exact language, but illegal immigrants and we will not let them be part of it and he is in the moment raising the brown spector and then joe wilson says, you lie. there is a black/white divide and anxiety integration mushed togeth together. this is the generation of race, and the described of of the white grays and the brown milennios. and by gray, you mean, because they are aging? exactly. the republican party is 87% white, and it is for all intents and purposes a whites only party. 2% of and then michael steele. well, he is one of the 2%, right. he is one of the 2% black people in that party. and so i think that it is an older party as well. so we are seeing this generation on conflict play between the two parties and that is partly going to get to the discussion of political polarization, and older white folks trying to pull the line back for and say what they think is the sense of the american exceptionalism, and american dream, and they don t want to give access to the brown and the black folks coming up and in fact, they believe they are freeloaders and that is part of that reflected in the politics. well, i m not sure this makes us exceptional as americans, because this is precisely what europe is doing. in that sense i could start to wave the european flags, too, where germany and france. all of the imperial nations when the folks from the colonies start coming to the motherland and asking for the same social services. and this is going back to the economic insecurity, and one of the, you know, people, and again, looking for somebody to blame, and afraid and not sure what they are afraid of, a lot of people anyway, and here comes some politicians happy to exploit the fear and telling you that some immigrant is going to take your job and that is a basic fear that people have, that somebody is coming in to work for less than you do, and we have a dysfunctional immigration policy and undermining our own economy everyday because we won t let in the immigrants who are job creators, and by the way, the statistics are clear on this, the most dynamic small business owners are immigrants, the people who come here and start businesses. immigrants start businesses at a way higher proportion than people here. and we are shutting them out and saying, well, we are just going to somehow find other ways to fix the economy. it is crazy. youthful intervention, and the pie shrinks and economic anxiety increases. and u.n. monitors are investigating yet another massacre where dozens of women and children were killed. speaking of american exceptionalism, is there an american duty to intervene? we will ask about the international aspect of the exceptionalism when we come back. hi, i m phil mickelson. i ve been fortunate to win on golf s biggest stages. but when joint pain and stiffness from psoriatic arthritis hit, even the smallest things became difficult. i finally understood what serious joint pain is like. i talked to my rheumatologist and he prescribed enbrel. enbrel can help relieve pain, stiffness, and stop joint damage. because enbrel, etanercept, suppresses your immune system, it may lower your ability to fight infections. serious, sometimes fatal events including infections, tuberculosis, lymphoma, other cancers, and nervous system and blood disorders have occurred. before starting enbrel, your doctor should test you for tuberculosis and discuss whether you ve been to a region where certain fungal infections are common. don t start enbrel if you have an infection like the flu. tell your doctor if you re prone to infections, have cuts or sores, have had hepatitis b, have been treated for heart failure, or if, while on enbrel, you experience persistent fever, bruising, bleeding, or paleness. [ phil ] get back to the things that matter most. ask your rheumatologist if enbrel is right for you. [ doctor ] enbrel, the number one biolog medicine prescribed by rheumatologists. that s good morning, veggie style. hmmm. for half the calories plus veggie nutrition. could ve had a v8. the news of syria this week has been chilling. blood stains, bullet holes and shell casings were what greeted a team of u.n. observers when they reached the province of homa. and the forces are accused of slaughters men, women and children in a bombardment of heavy weaponry and executions. in the past, news abroad might want us to put the full force of people behind the defenseless people, and we are americans, and what we do. it is just another part of what makes us exceptional as john mccain suggested when he spoke thursday from the senate floor. military intervention of some kind is a prerequisite to the resolution of the conflict we want to achieve. how much more have to die? how many more before we will act? but as it turns out acting actually may not be what we do or at least that is the feeling of the majority of americans who believe that the u.s. has no responsibility to intervene in syria. back with me are anthea butler and raul reyes, and dorian lord and rick newman. we were talking about how it was the post war era and after the great world war ii and the great sacrifices of that war that we became the best most exceptional selves, and yet here we are at this moment facing what feels like a similar human rights horrors and is that the way we re-establish the exceptionalism is to step in at a a moment like this? this has been a thorny problem. the united states has not always stepped in when there have been genocides even. in the 90s we did not intervene in row wan dashgs and in the genocide there, and we watched slaughter happen in the former yugoslavia for two to three years before backing into that one, and syria is another case. on a moral sense, yes, we clearly should be doing more. this is obviously complicated involving iran and believe it or not involves the price of gas here in the united states, and if you are thinking about this like in a geostrategic sense, you are thinking that if that regime falls, it is much better for that regime to be pushed out from inside syria than for the united states to be seen as taking one regime out, and then getting stuck with the problem of imposing another. so from the strategic sense, there is a reason to stay into margins, if you will. but it is uncomfortable to watch no doubt. and that is the problem of where we are at in terms of the exceptionalism today. what we see as exceptionalism and when you flip it, other countries see it as arrogance, bullying, mettling and imperialism, and a whole negative aside to it, and we have not always been conscious of that in the historical context when you look at the countries that have had this exceptional sense inherent in them. and it does not reflect well. nazi germany thought they were exceptional and japan and the british em empire, and it can be a tricky slope. well, what you said is striking in terms of what most americans dot no favor intervention. that is the difference between now and the immediate post-war period where we were instrumental in found iing the united nations to help the world to advance peace. and remember a few years ago well, we had to be dragged into the world war ii and really about at the tacks here. and both franklin and elleear roosevelt were crucial around the issues of war, and if you look back, multilateral inintervention is a bad thing, and who tells the u.s. what we can do. this sense of the world does not tell us what we need to do and we intervene wherever we want, and act alone is a shift from the immediate post war period of people thinking that no we need to act collectively as a glee ba global order. and this is what obama needs to interact, because with the language, there are drones and the way we continue to act unilaterally. yes, yes. he is acting unilaterally every time he blows a drone over anybody, and when is the drone going over syria. coming back to what you said about setting up dick tas or the a dictators and we do that all of the time in the kun i tri. saddam hussein. yes. and in all of these cases, do you see the humanitarian problems, and one of the worst things on clinton s administration is rwanda, and like you said we may see it again with bosnia and others like you said, and i feel myself torn, because i don t want to see the children s bodies with the holes in the abdomens. nobody does. nobody does. right. at the same is time how much of that do we have to see and what does it mean for us to intervene? think of the other ways to intervention that doesn t mean we have to drop a bomb on anybody. but ralph s point of our exceptionalism and our position to human rights internationally have been part of what is pressing civil rights at home. and it has allowed jim crow to and we are going to the u.n. and we are going to the u.n. to talk about it. we don t sign on to the world s international rights, and so we don t want to be held accountable, and it is easy to that is just other people s problems or we don t have the resources, it feels like, and we are the one remaining superpower. and do we have the resources? because i feel that the united states feels that in some instances we are above the law and we do what we want to do and wherever we want to do it. and usually when the oil is involved, but in other situations we opt out, and that is a terrible basis for the foreign policy. and how do you lead in the world right now. one of the things that we saw in the last year or two is the uprisings in the middle east. and it is great that egypt got rid of mubarak without us. and there was an indigenous uprising in egypt as khadafy disappeared. but we want to not be mettling, but help out. it is a tricky problem, and the question comes down to humility. humility is a component of great leadership and also very rare in leadership. and we are trying to, you know, how do we lead in a way that demonstrates some humility not to be arrogant. arrogant will bite us in the rear end all of the time, and we will try to figure out how to manage this. i love this idea that we land here at this moment saying perhaps that the thing that could make us most exceptional in this moment is to be exceptionally humble in our international world. how about powerfully humble. i want a t-shirt that says powerfully humble, american exceptionalism that you can believe in. thank you rick newman and the rest of you are going to stick around for a little bit. coming up, it is one of the fastest growing religions in the united states, but half of americans don t know about it. next nerdland is going to study up on the mormon faith. cuban cajun raw seafood pizza parlor french fondue tex-mex fro-yo tapas puck chinese takeout taco truck free range chicken pancake stack baked alaska 5% cashback. signup for 5% cashback at restaurants through june. it pays to discover. i would not say i m into it, but let s see where this goes. 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[ female announcer ] fortunately, there s an easier way with creditcards.com. compare hundreds of cards from every major bank, and find the one that s right for you. creditcards.com. it s simple. search, compare, and apply. creditcards.com. it s simple. progressive saved me money on my car insurance for doing the right thing behind the wheel. what a concept. excuse me, sir, do you know how fast you were going? exactly 25 miles per hour. that makes you a safe driver. keep driving safe. -are you serious? -absolutely. i couldn t help but notice, you applied your brakes smoothly and evenly. you know, progressive rewards safe drivers. think of this as a reward forward. thank you! nice you stopped at the stop sign. you qualify for a safe driver discount. wow! keep safe and keep saving. we are back and changing course in the conversation on american exceptionalism. you see, there is one religion that makes a strong theological claim that america is exceptional. the church of jesus christ of latter day saints also known as the mormon church believes that america is the holy land and yet so few americans knows about the religion. 50% of nonmormons know little or nothing about the religion, and 30% of those surveyed said that the mormon faith is not a christian religion and 40% of the people said they would feel somewhat or uncomfortable with a mormon president, but the lds church is among the fastest growing religions in the world boasting 14.4 million members and growing. 6 million of which are american citizens with 8 million converts in asia, africa and around the globe. there are 55,410 mormon missionaries dispatch eed at 43 missions around the world, and teach ing t teaching the world about their religion and convince ogers this to join the fold. but the mormon faith was born here on american soil in 1827 the year that the religion s founder and prophet joseph smith found the book of mormon written on golden plates. he spends years translating the tablets. 1841, the year that smith leaves the followers in missouri, the place to be the faith s promised land. in 1838, missouri s governor orders the mormons expelled from the state or exterminated if necessary making the wandering pioneers out of the mormon faith faithful. and then joseph smith announcs s his candidacy for the president of the united states and that campaign ended with his assassination that year leading to brigham young taking over as the presiding member of the church, and so that is how they ended nup ut ed up in utah afte taken over by brigham young. and still to this day, the faith is led by 12 white men who make up a quorum of apostles and serve as counsels of the church. led by one prophet of the lds church who today is thomas monson and then one more, one member of the church who hopes to be president of the united states, and will be the first mormon nominee of a major political party who would rather we didn t focus on the religion in the campaign, but whose candidacy shines a bright spotlight on the relatively young and largely unknown faith. so when we come back, i have a table full of mormons ark and m are are going to separate fact from fiction. it is going to be fun. come on back. and we dream up all the best stuff and we can make it up cause we were made for each other for always oh oh for always a living, breathing intelligence helping business, do more business. in here, opportunities are created and protected. gonna need more wool! demand is instantly recognized and securely acted on across the company. around the world. turning a new trend, into a global phenomenon. it s the at&t network securing a world of new opportunities. this week, brigham young university professor spencer flewman wrote an op-ed in the new york times explaining why we quote fear mormons and the responses were flooding in. i had a good time reading the article and the response pieces. making the mormons look bad makes others feel good by imagining them as intolerant boobs or deviants. this intolerance is at the center of the mormon history. right now we are in what could be described as a mormon moment dawning as the faith enters the mainstream. there was once only donny and marie, but now there is an ir rev rebt broadway musical the book of mormon and the symbolism heavy twilight series, and of course, the republican president nominee mitt romney. let s unpack the mormon myths and to do that is the man who started the conversation is spencer flewman and joanna brook brooks the senior correspondent for the dispatches, and the book mormon girl and dorian lord who is a s a sassistant profess political science at columbia university. thank you for being here and i m thrilled to have this conservation. spencer, i want to start with you, because i found the piece in the new york times to be incredibly useful for creating a frame of the issue is that the people like to pick apart all of the so-called weird beliefs or the troubling practices, because it helps us to feel better about ourselves. well, i think that the premise i started with both the op-ed and the book is that we would not seek to understand anti-semitism by looking at jewish strangeness and misbehavior. it is understainteresting to understand the anti-side we are not looking at the thank is discriminated against and nobody wants to paint mormons as innocent victims just for the sake of being picked on, but still it does not tell us a lot about the american culture and the tensions of american culture. for me it is the tensions of the religion and the public sphere and how should religion function in the public sphere, and mormonism has been a surrogate for the conversation for a very long time. and in part, but a it is the uniquely american religion and we have been talking a about the american exceptionalism, and there is this theory of theology embedded in the latter day of saints theology and we have in the church s articles of faith the literal gathering of israel and the rest roioration of the tribes and that zion, the new jerusalem, will be built upon the american continue nen. so there is a typical space that is so surprising me about the idea that americans know so little, and i mean, this is the jazz of religion, right, as the american version. yes, absolutely. the mormon moment is a moment in which america is finding out how little it knows about the 6 million mormons who live here in every state, every walk of life. it is a moment for us to really tell our story, and the question that spencer has raised is what kind of conversations are we having about mormonism, and contributing substantially to the public discourse about religion in general and asking the questions that matter and getting hung up on the unfamiliar aspects of the religion. and tell me a little bit, as we are thinking about the question of the big misconceptions, what is it that is happening and maybe you also want to reveal why you get to be at the table of mormons, but i m interested of why we get interested in the little so-called beliefs or the odd practices. well, first awi was baptizeds a mormon in the chicago southside and there are black mormons on the south side of chicago. yes. and it is part of the unknown as well. so, all we know are oh that mormons have the strange practices around say wives or, you know, popular culture contributes to this a lot and tv shows that glorify certain aspect aspects of certain myths of the religion, so it is the unknown and people really don t want to know more about the church. you know, it is also one of the wealthiest churches in the kun t country and in the world, and there is a reason for that, but americans don t want to know. and we put down blinders and say, they are not christian. they are somewhere over there. they have another book in addition to the bible. we don t know what that is all about. so i think that, you know, in such an evangelical country, we resist wanting to know about the other. and the usefulness to me about this idea is that in part, part of why we resisted is if we were to take our own sets of beliefs and whatever one s holy book is and the origin myths are, and set it down outside of faith, and read it as if it were this is what sort of happened on this day, i m not sure that, you know, pregnant virgins or stone tablets or anymore weird or odd or extraordinary than any other set of beliefs that are part of sort of faith claims. well, there are two things going on here. one is that americans don t know a lot about any faith other than their own and not just a problem with mormonism, and thinking of a great book called religious illiteracy, and americans practice faith more than western europe countries practice faith, but know less about everyone else s faith than the europeans do. and so religious illiteracy is an american problem that relates not only to mormonism, but other faiths as well. that is interesting giving how religious we are compared to europe. well, it is surprising. and also the fact that mormons are not telling our own stories in the mainstreams. our stories are told by nonmo nonmormons, and the book of mormon, and the south park creators and the musical, and it is generally a friendly depiction and sweet on mo mormons, but it is about sacrificing to build the community and being willing to be different for a good reason and holding yourself to the high ideals, and that is a story that the mormon moment will bring out unless we are fixated on the weirdness. i appreciate your talking about telling our own stories which we will do in the next segment, but as i read the forthcoming book, i loved the story of being a little kid and going to the birthday parties and needing to ask for the root beer instead of the coke, because lds does not, and people who are in latter day saints and who are practicing do not drink coffee, tea or colas. there is some backsliding, because a lot of us have the diet dr. pepper in the morning, and the mormon coffee. it is true. i love the idea of being a kid and navigating the practices, just this idea of what it means to be a kid who is different, and besides the belief, itself, and i thought, that i can relate to and that i get is the idea of being a different kid in that space. when i went into a room as a kid, i could tell, i grew up in southern california and not utah or the bosom of zion in utah, but that taught me to take responsibility of the living differently and living to the higher cause and i believe that experience of being different gives the mormons something powerful to draw from and it should, it should oblige us to think about the experience to think of people who are disadvantaged and marginalized and left out. that is how i experienced the faith. and we have a lot more the say, and speaking of the personal narratives, i will pull out the personal stock, because i am a mormon family, and i get to be at the table as well. that is coming up. i needed a coach. our doctor was great, but with so many tough decisions i felt lost. unitedhealthcare offered us a specially trained rn who helped us weigh and understand all our options. for me cancer was as scary as a fastball is to some of these kids. but my coach had hit that pitch before. turning data into useful answers. we re 78,000 people looking out for 70 million americans. that s health in numbers. unitedhealthcare. perhaps you have heard me mention this before. i come from mormon stock, and my father is a black man raised in the jim crow south and he is a direct descendent of a slave sold on a richmond street corner in virginia, but my maternal line is mormon and my great, great grand father was an englishman who converted to the faith and traveled to salt lake, utah. another member of my family is from the same generation served time in prison after he refused to give up his multiple wives when utah a made the change from territory to statehood and polygamy became illegal. my own mother was raised as a mormon and attended and graduated from brigham young universi university. i was never raised through the lds church, but through my family have come to learn a great deal about the history of the churchp, and also the persecution of so many religious groups before the mormons have faced. back at the table, we have jay spencer phluman and now we are joined by matt visor who as we know from the boston globe does not have a secret mormon stock to tell us about, and dorian lord, and joe anna. joanna, i want the drive your t attention to one point that i read last night and i know that i will get in trouble about talking about this, but you were talking about the black mormons and the very clear racist practices within the church, and you write, these are the unspoken legacies we inherit when we belong to a people. not only luminous visions of eternal expanses of love and kindness, but actual human histories of exclusion and rank prejudi prejudice. i thought, that s it. that when we are part of a people, we take it all. we talking about american exceptionalism, and we are both this extraordinary american nation full of goodness, and we are americans who still to this day write benefit from the realities of the slavery and jim crow, and talk to me about how we can in public space make that kind of narrative a way to discuss the problematic histories of the church? i was raised a as mormon to believe in a god that was with just, loving, powerful, and also raised in a church that when i was 7 years old only started to give the priesthood to men of african decent. that is a huge contradiction, because every mormon has a bundle of contradictions in this country, and how we deliberate the contradictions gives us the moral bearing and that is what religion does is to help us find our own moral bearings to deal with the business of the country that needs to be ironed out. it is an important discussion in the election year. it feels complicated, because these are not small points. no. it is not like, all religions behave that way. on one hand, yes, all religions behave that way, but for me right now my big issue with the mormon church is not theological or historical, but proposition 8 which i continue to see as exclusionary. but the mormon church is quintessentially american, and it reflects other american institutions and patriarchal institution and racial exclusion and when you get to the politics, remember that the church opposed equal rights amendments in the oo 70s in the rolef of the women and walk us up to the proposition 8 and being against same-sex marriage in california that comes out of the practice of the church in the sense of what people believe. in that sense, it is reflective of other american institutions and not unique in that sense. i would like to add, to, and this is a very good point dorian, and the stereotype runs that mormons are racist, an unintended consequence of the stereotype is that it neglects the change in the modern mormon church, but the other thing that it puts in the background black mormon voices. as you said in the outset, there are black mormons and the stereotype that mormons are racist, it erases the presence of the reality of black mormonism. go right, there because i am dying to book utah s mia love on the show, and since i can t book her yet, i want to listen for a moment as the i am mormon campaign, and this is the mayor of saratoga springs, utah, mia love. i am the mayor of saratoga springs, and i love it. i get to make this life better for me and better for others. my friends from back home are saying what are you doing in utah? what they don t know is that when i cam here, i felt accepted. i m a wife. i m a mother. i m a mayor. my name is mia love. and i am mormon. fascinating, right? thatle a loa alone, i want her show, because the notion of black women as mayor is in itself interesting, but the mayor of a utah town and she, herself, mormon and standing up there to say, yes, we have this history, and i am, but here i am in the modern representation a different sort of thing. is this part of the kind of story telling that americans will need to get past their anxiety about the mormon church do you think? yeah. i think that is what the church is hoping that we have open discussions like this about the church in a context that is not sharply partisan. you know, in a way that it could become over the next couple of months particularly with mitt romney who you mentioned the i am mormon campaign and he is the ideal poster for that in some ways and the most prominent mormon that most americans are going to know about and yet he does not talk about his own faith. and he is not eager to talk about the contradictory conflicts and that is what is difficult for us to enter the mainstream is to wrestle with the conflicts and we are usual human beings trying to walk our walk with god and evolving as we can on all kinds of issues. and another unintend consequence of this race is that when i went to the mormon church in hyde park, chicago, it is one of the most integrated spaces i was in and almost everybody was liberal and progressive and my snapshot of what mormonism was, is different from the church. but if we hold out of the mormons in the u.s. house of representatives there, there is little of a handful mostly from the western states and utah and arizona and nevada, and most everybody has an r next to their names. jim matheson. don t forget harry reid. yes, moving over to the senate, that is right. and part of it is the diversity piece, and part of it is the ideological diversity piece, but that said, what i don t want to do is to let off of the hook, the ways in which the institutional church has intervened in the land of politics. so we want to talk more about that institutional political question when we come back. we are going to talk not so much about the mormon church just sort of in a vacuum and not just because the most famous mormon in america is of course running for president, but how that question of romney s faith may impact the kind of president that he is and whether or not that is a fair question, and that is up next. u trade. so we have ongoing webinars and interactive learning, plus, in-branch seminars at over 500 locations, where our dedicated support teams help you know more so your money can do more. 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why is the mormon thing seen as a problem for the romney camp, it is in fact a drag on the chances of getting to the white house? and should it be? with me is the spencer phlewman, and joanna and matt visor from the boston globe, and also our panelist from the assistant professor of columbia university. is this mormonism important to the race? well, it is important in that his family is deeply intertwined with the church. he played a prominent role in the mormon church in massachusetts. it is an important part of who the core is and the family and he and his wife share that faith. so to understand mitt romney it is important. el we, there well, there is moment at the rnc convention where barack obama s was from chicago, and bill clinton s from hope, arkansas, and there is a point where there is going to be the mormons and pushcarts going across the plains. well, the question of romney and any presidential candidate, how is the moral affects your decisions? and in that context to talk about how i understand the problems that poor people may have as a role as a counselor in my church, or in the mission to france and also, does it make you feel committed to health care for everyone or decent education for everyone or work for dignity for everyone, and how do you feel about war and torture and these questions? well, is it fair to come up to mitt romney, and say, well, ak xhully the church of latter day saints has a strong position on the social welfare and we are doing it a lot with the catholicism, and the bishops saying it is about reproductive rights and the nuns saying, no it is the budget and whether the budget is a moral and ethical document, and pat part of me wa say, mr. romney, what about the caring for the poor and the collectivism, and not the individualis individualism. well, he stands for same-sex marriage, and on immigration less conservative with the church s position on reform. yes, that is true, because it is a missionary church that brings immigrants even those from my family. and mitt romney s family, and spending time in mexico, and the great, great grandfather was in the mexico community and has relatives in the community. and it is a fair question, because it is not like the mormon church itself has not entered politics, because it has entered the political sphere and therefore game-on, and what are the positions of the church ashs and the positions of romney and do we agree and disagree with those. and it is important to understand the leadership of the church. this is not a casual mormon and when you understand lay leadership and understand the position, this is someone for whom you point out, he would have to reconcile and any position different, at a minimum reconcile it for himself, and potentially with the leadership. and i don t think that you can see, and i don t think that you can see the public persona a apart from the bitter mormonism, and white and rich and male and all of the markers of privilege and why is he hesitant on mormonism? because people are bitter. you mentioned chicago at the chicago exposition, and mormons are not invite td to the parliament of religions, but mormons celebrated at hardworking community people, and secularized picture of mormonism, but there is a long history of mormon religion not co comfortable there, and that is one way to read him, and one way to comprehend the willing neneso present a kind of putting the religion to the side there. there is a long history there. i knowly get in trouble there, but i feel like the for themons are the black folks of the republican party, and by that, i mean that the african-americans give the vote to the democratic party from the mid-century on, and 90% of african-americans going to vote for the democratic party, and there is a lot of amicus for that voting, and it seems that president obama has to run away from that, and it seems that the vast majority of the mormons are republican, but they are held at arm s length at the party. well, it is an interesting point, and i do think that, you know, you do expect and i think it is 85% or 89% of mormons support mitt romney, and it is a high number. 87% yesterday. and it is not like he has to do anything to get to moremon vote. he he has got it. but yet, he does not talk about it a whole lot. and mormons have had to republican mormons have had to stomach a lot of the anti-mormon s in the evangelicals, and that is part of the gop, and we have seen the change in the 2008, but it has been a feature of the landscape. so when this came up last time, a religious question about a president running, it was john f. kennedy, and i want to listen to how jfk addressed the catholicism. because i am a catholic and no catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in the campaign have been obscured, so it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church i believe in. for that is important only to me, but what kind of america i believe in. i believe in an america with the separation of the church and the state is absolute. so, is this dish mean, i know that romney did the 2007 version, a nd he talked at liberty college, but is he going to need the statement of the jfk? well, is he going to do it? he has a personality that as mo mormons, carefully managed statements about the faith and don t show vulnerability or humanness or the baggage, and i don t know if he is set up to make the statement. the statement that is important for him to make like jfk, what impact has the faith made on the moral bearings and the economic and the political decision-making. it is interesting that mitt romney s father participated in a biography in the 60s called george romney a mormon politician and very much identity for his father, and public part of the identity, and we haven t seen that quite from mitt romney so far. i don t know, i mean, that the campaign doesn t i don t think that they want to give a mormon speech again and they felt like they dealt with it four years ago and avoided it altogether, and like you said earlier, the convention is going to be interesting to see how much they bring up his faith and background. and not just the faith, but the parents may have a problem for him, because we are having a good time with george romney and mitt s mom who ran for senate who are decidedly to the left of the son at a time when it was harder to be to the left. george romney is on record to support rights in the pay and equity that is much more aggressive for equality of all people under the law than mitt romney. for me, there are so many good reasons to not vote for mitt romney, and that is because i m a liberal progressive, so i think that, oh, my gosh, i can make you a whole case for not voting for mitt romney, but i don t want, and i just do not want the reason that any person makes the choice not to or to vote for mitt romney to be about an anti-mormon animus, so if you are on the right, there must be a bazillion great reasons not to vote for barack obama, but none of us want the lever to be pulled because of an anti-black am us in. amminus. and that is when reverend wright was entered and he was quick to say, that is out of bounds and not as quickly to say about donald trump and barack obama s birth ser certificate, it hits him in a way of sensitivity on the religious grounds and if reverend wright comes up, it brings up a whole o other set of mitt romney and his own faith that he is not eager to have as a national discussion. thank you for joining us, panel. thank you all for being here. dorian, you want to stick around a little bit longer, because the showdown is shaping up in florida who can vote, and who shouldn t be able to vote in an election where florida might decide what happens in november. what you need to know after the break. switch to citracal maximum plus d. it s the only calcium supplement that can be taken with or without food. that s why my doctor recommends citracal maximum. it s all about absorption. that s why my doctor recommends citracal maximum. pull on those gardening gloves. and let s see how colorful an afternoon can be. with the home depot certified advice to help us expand our palette. .and prices that keep our budgets firmly rooted. .we can mix the right soil with the right ideas. .and bring even more color to any garden. more saving. more doing. that s the power of the home depot. beat the bugs with ortho bug-b-gon max spray or concentrate just $7.97. new venus & olay. olay moisture bars help lock in moisture. while five blades get venus close. revealing smooth and goddess skin begins. only from venus & olay. 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[ zapping ] [ clang ] this is the next level of performance. the next level of innovation. the next rx. the all-new f sport. this is the pursuit of perfection. major showdown is wbrewing n the all-important state of florida and remember tim russert s white board, florida, florida, florida. well, bring out the white boards, because it looks like the tightening presidential race is about the florida s 29 votes, and that is why the voter rolls are the most important part of this. scott walker nominated a plan to purge the voting rolls to purge illegitimate voters, and now he is ordered to stop that. and now the secretary of state is giving the d.o.j. his own deadline, this coming monday to explain why it is illegal to remove noncitizens from the rolls, and in a letter to the d.o.j., he writes that the department of state respecti respectively, excuse me, respectfully disagrees with the d.o.j. s action and the actions taken by florida to identify and remove non-citizens from its voter rolls ensure that the right to vote of citizens is protected and it is not diluted. and this is what attorney general eric holder had to say. the problem with florida says that it runs counter of the federal rules saying that you cannot do this 90 days within an election a yond u can , and you florida has done and in north carolina and georgia and they did it via the right way. with this showdown, the stakes may be who ends up in the white house this fall. with me now from tallahassee is ian san ccho, the leon county voting commissioner. we have multiple levels going on, the florida governor and the secretary of state fight agent the local level, and then officials like you saying that we are not going the go forward with what the state is telling us to do. tell me exactly what is going on, on the ground in florida on this issue? well, it is a complex issue, because the supervisor off electionser the local election officials don t work for the governor, and we don t work for the legislature and for the most part, we are independently elected from the counties to ensure that the process works smoothly at the county level, and decentralizeded h historically, and what the governor is trying to do is to essentially rewrite the entire process in florida at the 11th hour trying to make us, the local officials subservient to the statewide policy, but as independent political officials our own general counsel sent us a memo last week that basically said that the state is probably in violation of the national voter registration act of 1993, and as a 24-year veteran of the administration, i was around when the nvra was passed and section eight of the law does prohibit a state from conducting a systemic purge with a few exceptions within 90 days of a federal election. may 17th is that deadline. and we are past it. ion, i so appreciate your position here, because you are one of the last of the critically important breed which is to say that your issue here is not about the democratic voters or the republican voters, but it is fundamentally about the voting process, itself, and how important are the stakes for aus as a democracy, and florida s quality of elections and not just outcome of the election in terms of the voter pernlg purge going on? well, this voter purge is done for political reasons not for pragmatic reasons. i.e., it is not because they, that anyone at the state has decided that there are lots of numbers of noncitizens who are registered to vote. the governor here was elected basically as a tea party candidate. that is his self-described moniker, and quite frankly, that base believes for example that barack obama didn t even win the 2008 election, and stolen through the voter fraud. this kind of extremist view is really what is motivating, i believe, this kind of a purge at this late hour. it does fulfill a campaign promise that the governor made to his supporters to root out this systemic voter fraud which is an election official, i can tell you that quite frankly, it does not exist as a problem in the country. in the state of florida for example, there are far more public officials indicted for corruption and 781 in the last decade than there have been even arrests for voter fraud. 178 cases have been turned over to the florida department of law enforcement, and of that only 11 cases even resulted in arrest. there is no systemic problem with florida s voter registration database. this is a controversy, in my opinion made for political reasons to motivate a base in a presidential election year, and quite frankly, the threat of just using politics or any means necessary to win at any cost, i think that does threatening the very existence of this republic. ion, i cannot imagine saying it better. thank you for being with us, and giving the report from there. and undoubtedly we will continue to talk about this and continue to talk about it in the very next segment. hang out, because the experts are here at the table to learn what we have learned about ion, and this is what matters and possibly the election. come back. ck. concrete. and steel. our cloud is the smartest brains combating the latest security threats. it spans oceans, stretches continents. and is scalable as far as the mind can see. our cloud is the cloud other clouds look up to. welcome to the uppernet. who have used androgel 1%, there s big news. presenting androgel 1.62%. both are used to treat men with low testosterone. androgel 1.62% is from the makers of the number one prescribed testosterone replacement therapy. it raises your testosterone levels, and. is concentrated, so you could use less gel. and with androgel 1.62%, you can save on your monthly prescription. 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[ female announcer ] purina cat chow indoor. always there for you. retalk tact showdown in florida and the possible purging of thousands of voters off of the rolls. joining me anthea butler, and raul and judith brown and here s is my theory about the lawsuit. this supreme court and this federal judiciary terrifies me. if you guys take florida to court, is this the end of the voting rights act? no, it is not. first of all, we will be filing a lawsuit under the national voter registration act. we have to step back at what is happening here, and florida likes to be the innovators of voter suppression, and they have take page out of the republican voter playbook, and it is not just what has passed in nine states over the past two years, but also the purges. that is how you win the elections and the reason that people should care is because in 2000, it is 537 votes that the e election came to and here is 180,000 potential voters who could be purged and most ly latino, but it impacts the elderly and impacts college students, so, you know, this is a broad play that they are going for, and you know, we are going to fight it, and the d.o.j. is stepping in, and it is great that we are, you know, really anteing up, and the governor has decided to be recalcitrant. and i read an article that says he is standing in the schoolhouse door, and this idea of massive resistance, and in a purple state with 29 electoral college votes. i mean, it is one thing to do this in a state that is likely to be democrat or republican, but florida might decide the election. i have to say that i found it incredibly courageous that mr. sancho is so willing to stand up to let it out. and when you look at the purge, it is 48% hispanic, and 40% african-american. so it is blatant. and the local people say that we are not getting in part of this, because they know we will come after them, too. and this is state s rights, and what he h is trying to assert the state right to do whatever they want to do, and you can read this, because back all of them were doing it and disenfranchising people. i love for all of the state s rights language, it is the local officials who were saying, not over here. and we were talking in one of the breaks of the incredible turnout in wisconsin and we should have a discussion of how the expand the democracy and get everybody to the polls, and instead, we are forced to have this discussion and fight these battles around the voter suppression, and it is amazing to me how in the 21st century, we are having a fight over the age-old tactic of the you can t win the election, exclude people in the first place. if you can t win, because was you have a better ground game and voters choose you, fine. but if you have won because you have purged actual it citizens m the laws and changed the rules of the game, and also a partisan game, and also about undermining the democracy and cut off the participation so that the people who showed nup ed up in 2008, elderly and college students won t show up this time. and what about the minorities of the people that are sitting around the table, and how do we build the largest possible coalition? well, you have to start by fighting back and understand in the history of voting and recognize that lots of people have died so that we would have a right to vote. i remember the mtv get out the vote, and we need the same thing, but in florida they continue do it, because the league of women s voters hands are tied. don t get out the vote. everybody stay home! and yes, it is a day that at the end of the day, you should not care if you are right or left, but worry about the democracy and it is a great equalizer, but a on the election day, we have the same amount of power. that is one person, one vote. in a moment, three jersey girls who could have spent their summer at the shore, but instead, they decided to change the world. and now it is time for a preview of what is ahead with alex witt. yes. mitt romney and president obama have developed new talking lights. and gary johnson is talking about the new ad and why it is painting a gloomy picture. and the fight for the bring fascinating results of a new focus group of female voters. i ll have the another leads all the leaders. but it won t be a triple crown. don t go away. i have a great story of three fabulous teenagers. and they re jersey girls. come back, hear their story. they re our foot soldier this is week. time for the entrepreneur of the week. he topped tough mudder while at harvard business school. it s a miles long obstacle that inspires people and builds teamwork. with more than 30 events in 2012, tough mudder will earn more than $70 million. for more, watch your business sunday mornings at 7:30 on msnbc. ovider is different but centurylink is committed to being a different kind of communications company by continuing to help you do more and focus on the things that matter to you. i wish i could keep it this way. 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[ whirring and beeping ] [ ding! ] and we give you a discount on both. sort of like two in one. how did you guys think of that? it just came to us. what? bundling and saving made easy. now, that s progressive. call or click today. progressive saved me money on my car insurance for doing the right thing behind the wheel. what a concept. excuse me, sir, do you know how fast you were going? exactly 25 miles per hour. that makes you a safe driver. keep driving safe. -are you serious? -absolutely. i couldn t help but notice, you applied your brakes smoothly and evenly. you know, progressive rewards safe drivers. think of this as a reward forward. thank you! nice you stopped at the stop sign. you qualify for a safe driver discount. wow! keep safe and keep saving. our foot sedges this week are three young women, high school sophomores in the midst of taking finals who are making the case to right what they sales representative a wrong. they recently found out what any of us could have realized had we bothered to look. no woman has moderated a presidential debate since carol simpson of abc news 20 years ago. how can the issues important to women be addressed if they haven t been given the chance to ask them, asks one of the young women. and they re starting to take action, in the form of a petition on change.org which already has more than 100,000 signatures. they also have some suggestions for who the moderators can be. and let s be clear. there are plenty of women to choose from. like cnn s candy crowley who has been covering presidential politics since the nomination of jim ri carter. or lesley staal, a white house correspondent during the reagan administration. if comparable experience is of concern, consider gwynn eiffel. at the risk of sounding like a corporate shill, i ll proed proudly point to my colleague here at msnbc, andrea mitchell. our jersey girl foot soldiers are growing up when one of the icons of cool is a woman who went from first lady to senator to presidential candidate to secretary of state. and when women voters are capable of deciding national elections. but they ve never watched a woman pose her own questions in her own voice to the men who seek the nation s highest office. the fact that there hasn t been a female moderator of one of the debates in so long is just another sign that america is a long way from being as equal as it thinks it is, another one of our young women from montclair said. indeed, these students have a congress that thinks it s reasonable to discuss contraception without talking to my women and live in a country where male lawmakers make policy to peer inside women s pregnant bodies and live in a country where women still earn less than their male counterparts. shouldn t they also live in a country country where a woman has the opportunity to at least ask why. for pushing that idea forward, emma, sammy and elena are our foot soldier this is week. and that is our show for today. thank you to our panel for sticking around. thanks for watching. i m so excited about tomorrow s show. reverend al sharpton will be here and so is actress nicole parker, right here at this table. coming up, weekends with alex witt. 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[ male announcer ] because enbrel suppresses your immune system, it may lower your ability to fight infections. serious, sometimes fatal, events including infections, tuberculosis, lymphoma, other cancers, and nervous system and blood disorders have occurred. before starting enbrel, your doctor should test you for tuberculosis and discuss whether you ve been to a region where certain fungal infections are common. don t start enbrel if you have an infection like the flu. tell your doctor if you re prone to infections, have cuts or sores, have had hepatitis b, have been treated for heart failure, or if, while on enbrel, you experience persistent fever, bruising, bleeding, or paleness. if you ve had enough, ask your dermatologist about enbrel. high noon here in the east, 9:00 a.m. out west. welcome to weekends with alex witt. here are some of the first five stories trending this hour. a white house search for leaks. a megachurch televangelist arrested. a costly buffett lunch. the lohan wreck and the triple crown shocker. but first new today, a big push to stop a string of national security leaks. the attorney general just named two federal prosecutors to investigate the source of those leaks. mike viqueira is live at the white house for us. with a good day, mike, what s the official word on these investigations. reporter: the allegation here. reporter: the accusation from many republicans in congress is that the administration intentionally leaked classified information in an effort to make the president look tough on terrorists in an election year. one about a so-called kill list approved by the president to take out targets in the middle east and afghanistan, yemen and other places through drone strikes. another about the so-called cyber war versus iran. a controversy has erupted since those
Something for us, those who supported you and what do you make this as a reaction? well, the pushback is to be expected, but it is distorted as amnesty, because i explained it is nothing. a chance for them to tell the story to the judge and gives the judge discretion. no guarantees. right. but for latinos, it is important, because finally this is something that obama has pledged he could do and act on the promises. it is not the politically you could say he is throwing the latino community a bone and it is not the whole enchilada, but something that the rest of us will be excited about it. i will never forget you said that raoul reyes. thank you. and we will see what happens with the 300,000 people caught in the middle here. thank you. and we are hearing from the university of miami football players about the major scandal surrounding that team. it involves a convicted ponzi scheme architect and former university of miami booster who says he provided cars and planes